Ph.D. Program in Political Theory
Department of History and Political Science
Cycle XXIV
Resilience of authoritarianism and its projection onto international politics
The case of Russia
Ph.D. Dissertation
By
Anar A. Khamzayeva
Dissertation supervisor:
Prof. Raffaele Marchetti
Rome, March 2012
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to all those who gave me the possibility to
complete this thesis.
I am deeply indebted to my supervisor Prof. Raffaele Marchetti who has provided me
with invaluable guidance and has provoked me to think critically about the questions
and problems I am studying.
I would like to thank Michael Emerson who has offered me much advice and from
whom I have learned immensely.
I extend my gratitude to Prof. Sebastiano Maffettone, Prof. Daniele Archibugi, Prof.
Thomas Ambrosio and Prof. Leonardo Morlino for their insightful comments and
feedback that have influenced significantly the course of my work.
Special thanks to Tania Haddad, my LUISS classmate, for her support and friendship.
I would like to sincerely thank my sisters, Asel and Asem, for their encouragement and
confidence they have instilled in me throughout these years of PhD studies.
Warmest thanks to my son Arlan and my niece Dayana for bringing so much joy into
my life and filling my heart with love that enabled me to complete this work.
My deepest love and gratitude go to my parents, Almaz and Gulistan Khamzayev, who
have inspired me and to whom this dissertation is dedicated.
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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................................4
Chapter 1. The contemporary discourse on democratization…………………………………………….10
On democracy’s current international prospects.
Revisiting the definition of democracy
Democracy - a universal value?
Ideological alternatives to democracy, are they strong?
Chapter 2. Sketching a framework of authoritarianism: sources of resilience………………..……27
Part I. The contours of the field of study.
Contemporary authoritarian regimes as distinct.
Part II. Why and how authoritarian regimes last?
a. The internal factors.
b. The external factors.
Chapter 3. Regime type and international behavior: focus on authoritarian states…..………….50
Part I. Democratic Peace Paradigm.
Part II. International behavior of authoritarian states as distinct?
Chapter 4. Russia’s authoritarian political regime: sources of resilience…………………………….68
Part I. The domestic factors protracting an authoritarian rule in Russia.
A consolidated state under the Putin regime. Medvedev’s modernization objectives.
The 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections and their consequences.
Societal support for the regime, ‘voter fatigue’ and opposition strength.
Part II. The external factors protracting an authoritarian rule in Russia.
International environment in the immediate post-Cold War period.
Russia’s strategic importance for the West.
The impact of the ‘Color revolutions’ and the “Arab Spring” on Russia’s domestic political
trajectory.
International environment after 2008 global financial crisis and its impact on Russia.
Conclusion
Chapter 5. Russia’s “domestic” foreign policy……………………………………………………...…………….95
Major Domestic drivers of Russia’s foreign policy
a. The role of Putin’s leadership
b. Consolidation of centralized state rule
c. Public support of the foreign policy course of the state
d. Economic growth fueled by high-energy revenues, coupled with increased state-control
share of economy
e. The great power ambitions of the ruling elite
f. The role of security and military elite
Russia in its ‘Near Abroad’: promoting autocracy while furthering national and commercial
interests
Russia and other authoritarian states
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………118
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……126
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Introduction
The research puzzle
Coming originally from the former Soviet bloc and having subsequently moved to
experience life in the West, I’ve become quite fascinated by the idea that people around the
world experience living under divergent modes of political governance. Having been greatly
inspired by Fukuyama’s (1992) “end of history” thesis, I’ve pondered continuously the notion
of Western liberal democracy being the highest and final political form to which humanity can
aspire. Perhaps it is true to say that more than at any time in history, people around the world
acknowledge that their societies ought to be democratic. Liberal democracy, championing
individual freedom and self-government, having delivered high levels of prosperity and stable
governance to advanced societies, continues to enjoy the global prestige and wide legitimacy,
with no powerful ideological alternatives in sight.
The Soviet system of centralized control and order has collapsed, yet what remains is
centralized rule itself. Authority narrowly and more often illegitimately exercised remains a
steady feature of the political landscape against the background of unprecedented levels of
globalization, economic and financial interdependence the world has ever witnessed. Indeed
it is puzzling why, given the present era of democratization and globalization, authoritarian
rule is proving its resilience and persistence. To a large extent, political science field has not
been able to fully explain, let along anticipate, why it is so.
Central research questions and hypotheses
The overarching research questions of the present analysis are:
-
Why authoritarianism in Russia remains resilient in the age of democratization?
-
How is being an authoritarian regime impacts on its international behavior and
international system as a whole?
My hypotheses are outlined as follows:
-
Russia is by and large a stable authoritarian regime.
-
Authoritarian regime stability in Russia is brought about by the prevalence of both
domestic and external factors.
-
Domestic political setting under the Putin regime strongly influences foreign policy
aims and capabilities of Russia.
4
In this study I thoroughly explore and demonstrate relevant theoretical and empirical
findings in the existing literature in order to support my hypotheses.
This analysis begins with definitions, namely of what constitutes an ‘authoritarian
regime’. Among the foundational works, one of the most widely used definitions of
authoritarianism is the one put forward by Juan Linz (1975:255): “authoritarian regimes are
political systems with limited, not responsible political pluralism, without intensive nor
extensive political mobilization, and in which a leader or a small group exercises power
within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones.” By this terminology,
Linz has sought to draw a distinguishing line between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes
with the degree of social pluralism and levels of political mobilization as the distinctive
elements, with the former seeking to demobilize and depoliticize society politically while
allowing for some degree of pluralism.
The very relevance of Linz’s account of authoritarian politics is reinforced by the fact
that his 1975 work was republished in 2000 almost completely unchanged. Closely following
Linz, Huntington (1991) defines an authoritarian regime as one where there is a single leader
or group of leaders with no party or a weak party, little mass mobilization, and limited
political pluralism.
This analysis utilizes Schedler’s (2002) definition of what he terms ‘hegemonic’
regimes as those in which “formal democratic institutions exist on paper but are reduced to
façade status in practice”. It is argued that this definition can be equally applied to denote
‘authoritarian’ regimes proper. By using such a definition, the aim is to emphasize extraelectoral features of authoritarian politics, while a significant number of studies in this area
have tended to stress primarily the role of contested elections in order to delineate autocratic
and democratic regimes (see for example Brooker 2000; Przeworski et.al. 2000). The study
further utilized a definition of a regime as “the set of government institutions and of norms
that are either formalized or are informally recognized as existing in a given territory and
with respect to a given population” (Easton 1965, referred to by Morlino 2012).
Methodology
The research conducted has largely relied on qualitative research method. The main
method is an overarching analytical approach, combined with an in-depth overview of
multilevel empirical inquiry. The study is based on theories and findings in the relevant
literature and involves a case-study. For the case-study, the research has relied upon
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documentary analysis, both background literature as well as analysis of events. The idea was
to explore a quite recent area of research within political science literature, related to the field
of regime-studies and comparative democratization.
In the primary data collection, the research conducted has benefited considerably from
a line of interviews of predominately Russian and Western scholars and policymakers in
Moscow, Brussels, Madrid and Rome. Four-month study abroad period was conducted in
Brussels, Belgium at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), where the author has
worked under the supervision of Michael Emerson, CEPS associate senior research fellow and
one of the leading scholars on Russia. For the data on Russian opinion polls surveys, most of
reference was made to the results obtained by the Russian Levada Center, as one of the most
influential Russia-based and widely utilized database.
Thorough understanding of both democracy and authoritarianism requires a selection
of a good case for study and that is Russia, a country that has experienced a tremendous
socio-political change in the course of the last several decades since the collapse of the Soviet
Empire. The beginning of the 1990s saw an aura of optimistic expectations of Russia’s
inevitable turn toward the democratic path of development. Russia’s case was among the top
of the list of countries in the focus of democratization scholars; those highly convinced that
democracy would rapidly advance there. Yet, a decade later, in the minds of many there was
little doubt that the democratic gains of the past years were reversing in Russia, stimulating
further discussion about the prospects of democracy globally. Russia’s post-communist
experience stands to reveal a great deal about the many sides of the authoritarian newly
found resurgence.
Russia is by and large an authoritarian regime. Freedom House’s annual ‘Nations in
Transit’ report on Russia has throughout the years become a rather strong critic of the
political regime there, describing Russia in its 15th(2011) edition as being ‘based on
lawlessness and a lack of transparency’ and characterized by a growing political stagnation.
According to the report, Vladimir Putin has managed to turn his country into a ‘consolidated
authoritarian regime’. Tracing the Democracy score since the year 2000 up to 2011, there was
a significant worsening from 4.58 to 6.18, respectively. Overall, the Russian political system is
described in the Report as being personalistic, lacking democratically functioning standards
and institutions and meaningful citizen participation. Executive branch dominates all other
branches of government. There is a tight control over media and civil society groups;
corruption is pervasive.
Russian political regime has been often described as resembling other authoritarian
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regimes where leaders seek to wrap themselves in some form of democratic legitimacy. The
ruling authority in Russia bases its legitimacy on regime’s economic performance and
leadership popularity. As Linz would have it “a more institutionalized authoritarian regime in
which the rulers feel they are acting for a collectivity”(p.54) Russia represents a regime of
strong and centralized state power. The ruling class has been tremendously successful in
keeping consensus. Overall, there is a top-down approach of governance in achieving some
liberalization and reform. The goal is to bring about economic modernization without political
modernization.
Russia is however a country of a great potential. From a macroeconomic point of view,
Russia is a relatively successful country. Its GDP has grown by 30% in the course of last five
years and the federal budget has expanded substantially, inflation is down; external debt has
been lowered by half. These are significant indicators, yet the reality is that the growth of
Russian economy is still hanging on the price of oil. However, the Russian authorities remain
firmly convinced in their ability to provide Russia’s economic ascendancy while maintaining a
tight grip on national politics.
Russia has increasingly been considered a rising non-democratic power that seeks to
secure its economic and geopolitical interests, gain global recognition as a state with its own
political course of development. (McFaul 2007; McFaul and Spector 2010; Carothers 2008;
Lipman 2008; Kagan 2008) This assumption primarily rests on the fact that since the early
2000 with the regime growing more authoritarian in nature, its foreign policy agenda has
started to be become more pronounced and ambitious. The Putin regime’s strategy to achieve
a great power status for Russia involved primarily building a strong state at home; a robust
market economy; capability to respond to external threats; strengthened ties with Russia’s
peripheries and develop partnership with the West.
At the same time the Russian leadership has a strong interest in ensuring that its
political system is insulated as much as possible from the global democratic trends. There is a
firm resistance to having other countries dictate Russia how it should govern itself or what
standards it should adhere to as exemplified in former Russian President Medvedev’s most
recent speech on democracy in Russia at the 2010 Yaroslav Global Policy Forum. Medvedev
has stressed that “Russia is a democracy – young and immature, imperfect and inexperienced,
but it is a democracy’, calling criticism of Russia’s system ‘unfair and tendentious’ (Medvedev,
2010).
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Organizational structure of the thesis
Russia is one of the countries that have so intensely resisted Western democracy
promotion. This has in time resulted in the so-called ‘Russian model’ (coined by Freedom
House) of resistance to external democratization efforts and many other governments have
begun emulating this model. In the light of this, Chapter 1 will examine the latest global
democratization trends. The democratic regression is propelled to a large extend by a number
of critical developments across the world, such as the difficulties of democracy building in
Iraq, the regression to authoritarianism in Russia and the global rise of anti-Americanism
(Plattner 2008:18).
The study of authoritarian regimes addressed in Chapter 2 seeks to examine
contemporary literature that deals with the question of why and how authoritarian regimes
last. In the field of comparative democracy, authoritarian resilience has not been extensively
covered. What we see now is that the notion of authoritarian government is often used as
virtually a synonym for non-democratic government. A relevant question remains: why do
some regimes not fall to democracy?
Chapter 3 takes the discussion on authoritarianism to the external dimension in order
to examine whether authoritarian regimes behave differently in the international realm in
comparison to their democratic counterparts. The reference will significantly be made to the
Democratic Pace Paradigm and scholarly literature dealing with the question on the role of
regime type as a variable in the study of international relations.
Chapter 4 looks in-depth at the domestic political setting in Russia and at the same
time it seeks to examine how, if at all, external environment influences its domestic political
setting. It is argued that examining Russian domestic setting and its foreign policy, since the
early post-Soviet period, may shed some light on the relevant theoretical findings on
authoritarian resilience. It suffices to examine whether or not there are specific factors that
contribute to prolonging an authoritarian rule in Russia?
Chapter 5 seeks to link the authoritarian regime of Russia and its current foreign policy
course. The main aim is to properly account for the dynamics and patterns of Russia’s foreign
policy behavior through the prism of its domestic political setting. It will be argued that like
its domestic policy, Russia’s foreign policy became increasingly centralized, highly dominated
by Putin and his closest advisors. Putin’s foreign policy during his tenure as the president was
defined as being hardheaded and assertive. The analysis addresses the question: is there an
increase in the influence of such a regional power like Russia on governance structures in its
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neighbouring countries of foreign Soviet Union? At the same time, the idea is to contribute to
the growing literature on authoritarian regimes that seeks to address the question of why and
how such form of rule continues to persist in an age of democratization.
Egorov and Sonin (2011) claim that “the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 has (re)turned public
interest to authoritarian regimes”. The recent dramatic events in the Arab world undoubtedly
mean a lot for the study on authoritarian resilience. In the minds of many there is no doubt
that 2011 is 1989 of Middle East. Back then nobody could have foreseen those dramatic
events in the history of the European continent. By the same analogy, the recent events in the
Arab world came as a predominately welcomed surprise to the world at large. The domino
effect, mass protests and uprisings, demands for reform, democracy and transparency are the
critical factors present in both cases. The questions linger: what will come next? Will all these
events lead to a successful transition to democracy? Will the necessary economic and social
reforms be introduced? The first requirement in building stable democracies is to create
favorable conditions under which diverse parties will be able to negotiate, election rules will
be established and agreements on constitutional changed reached. Once an authoritarian
regime has been dismantled, this is precisely the task, albeit immensely difficult one, to be
carried out.
The international promotion of democracy has come across a rather serious resistance
on the part of the leading authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China. Authoritarian
regimes worldwide will remain a visible trend, thereupon stimulating further in-depth
research in why and how such regimes remain a steady feature of the political landscape.
Undoubtedly, authoritarian regimes of today are facing opportunities as well as constraints
presented by the globalized international system.
The more entrenched become authoritarian regimes, the broader must be the research
field to encompass domestic and international factors, combining both structural
explanations and more contingent and agency-related (actors, decisions, events) explanations.
Which domestic factors stand as determinative of an authoritarian regime trajectory? What is
the precise relevance of external influence on entrenched authoritarianism? The aim of this
analysis is to demonstrate through the case study on Russia that the interplay between
domestic and international factors serve to protract an authoritarian rule.
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Chapter 1. The contemporary discourse on democratization
The aim of this chapter is to sketch the contemporary discourse on global
democratization, prevailing trends and arguments among the leading scholars in the field.
Doing so is pertinent for the overall analysis in order to show how the discourse on the
processes of democratization has gradually moved to incorporate the analysis of
authoritarian resilience evident from the mid-1990s, an issue previously examined only
scantly in democracy research field.
It suffices to examine the effects, if any, the current democratization setbacks may have
on prevailing academic debate on the notion of modern democracy itself, its universal
applicability, and whether it faces serious ideological challengers. The chapter will first of all
focus on the current democratization trends and examine factors that have contributed,
arguably, to a plausible decline in democracy’s global outreach.
On democracy’s current international prospects
Following the end of the Cold War, scholars have enthusiastically defined the
subsequent era – the world with democracy as the only dominant principle of political
legitimacy and the US, the sole superpower. The current state of affairs can still be
characterized along the same lines; there are an unprecedented number of democracies all
around the world, emerging as a result of the explosive wave of democratization after 1989.
At that time due to certain historical changes a more favorable environment for global
democratization was in place, letting Huntington (1991) speak with confidence of a ‘third
wave’ of global democratization, having begun in 1974 with the pro-democracy military coup
that overthrew Portugal’s longstanding dictatorship and stretching into the 1990s.
According to a number of influential scholars in the field, however, global
democratization has seen a declining trend in the last few years. Even Huntington himself was
cautious about the extent and long-term prospects of this third wave and already by late
1990s was already observing a possibility of a reversal of the third wave. Unlike in previous
reverse waves of democratization, a characteristic feature of the current democratic
regression is that fewer countries than which initially made a transition to democracy have
been affected. Of the 141 democracies, which existed between 1974 and 2007 (including 95
newly emerging democracies), only a few suffered a full democratic breakdown (Diamond
2008: 61(Table 3.1). What have emerged however as a result of stalled transitions were
hybrid regimes (discussed in Chapter 2).
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In its 2006 survey of political rights and civil liberties worldwide, Freedom in the World,
Freedom House indicated as its principle findings that “the year 2006 saw the emergence of a
series of worrisome trends that together present potentially serious threats to the stability of
new democracies, as well as obstacles to political reform in societies under authoritarian
rule.” (Puddington, 2007: 125)
It has been noted that 2002-2006 period has shown notable improvements for freedom,
whereas the succeeding four years (2006-2010) have demonstrated a reversal of this
trajectory based on all applied indicators of the survey. The indicators that have been least
affected were elections and the core components of political pluralism, such as party
competition and minority groups participation. The indicators that have shown the most
critical setbacks pertain to the realm of governance, i.e. a measure of how governments
function, including the corruption indicators, freedom of expression, the rule-of-law category
(Puddington, 2011: 24).
These findings concur with Diamond’s (2008) compelling argument that democracies
were ‘on the retreat’ and that parallel to what he sees as the phenomenon of the ‘democratic
rollback’, there is the process of a ‘resurgence of the predatory state’ on an international level.
Diamond speaks of a worldwide fall in the confidence in democracy, primarily in developing
countries and the spread of corrupted semi-democracies that are inefficient in delivering
good governance to their populace, which in turn gives rise to predatory states as
authoritarian alternatives to failed democratic inefficient governance.
Contrary to both Diamond’s ‘democratic rollback’ argument and Puddington’s ‘freedom
in retreat’ claim, Merkel’s (2010:26) analysis assesses the statistical calculations of Freedom
House data to argue that ‘roughly the same amount of hybrid regimes have moved into the
zone of ‘free’ countries as have moved toward the category of countries rated ‘not free’ and
that “even partly free regimes as the least durable and most fragile of the three types of
regimes [free, partly free and not free] have in fact enjoyed relative stability after the third
wave of democratization had come to a halt in the mid-1990s”.
Overall however, by early 2007 democracy and democracy promotion efforts have
come to face the kind of challenges not yet seen since the end of the Cold War. (Plattner,
2008) In 2008, the Economist stressed that “following a decades-long global trend in
democratization, the spread of democracy has come to a halt.”1 A number of significant factors
have been highlighted to account for this phenomenon. These include developments at
Democracy Index: Off the March, the Economist, October 29, 2008,
http://www.economist.com/markets/rankings/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=1249935
1
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domestic level in a number of countries as well as political and economic trends at the level of
the international system.
At the international level of analysis, sharp increase in the price of energy resources,
primarily oil and increasing Western dependence on imported supplies, have had a major
consequence for recent setbacks to democracy. Between 2001 and 2008, oil prices increased
from around $20 to $150 a barrel (Youngs, 2010). One must recall that none of developing
countries that derive more than 60 percent of their export earnings from oil and gas exports is
a consolidated democracy. For instance, Venezuela and Nigeria are countries whose
economies are extremely dependent on oil, and as oil revenues increased, democratic gains
decreased. The producer countries have used the state oil funds to distribute patronage-based
largesse, thereupon generating democracy-weakening rentier dynamics. An influential rentier
state hypothesis in fact claims that resource wealth contributes to the survival of autocracy
and major proponents of this view (e.g. Ross 2001; Smith 2004; Ulfelder 2007) have gone to
great length to demonstrate the direct causal link between these variables.
A parallel worrying trend has been pointed out by various democratization advocates,
namely that Western states have increasingly resorted to a realpolitic approach to energy
security and the war on terror in their foreign policies, which has starkly undermined the
promotion of democratic governance in the non-democratic producer states, with the latter
enjoying sharply increased energy revenues and greater international leverage.
A critical indicator of democracy’s hard times nowadays have been developments in
the Middle East and the failure of the former US President George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda
– the campaign to promote democracy around the world – and above all in that critical region.
It must be recalled that since the early 1990s there was a general acceptance of democracy
promotion as an international norm, as a ‘world value’ of promoting human rights,
development, and peace (McFaul 2004). The idea has in turn given rise to a proliferation of
democracy-assistance programs with the aim of assisting technically and materially
governments and nongovernment organizations to consolidate democracy.
The Bush administration however has tarnished its reputation by violating democratic
and human rights norms both domestically and abroad, thus weakening the legitimacy of
democracy-promotion efforts. As a consequence, the Western democracy promotion
enterprise has been faced with a strong ‘backlash’ on the part of nondemocratic regimes
around the world, being closely associated with the US regime change agenda. Carothers
(2006) points out that governments across the globe have condemned democracy-building
programs in their countries, denouncing them as “illegitimate political meddling”, as
12
American interventionism, not US foreign policy goal of democracy promotion. Carothers
claims that such allegation is not wholly unjustified because while ‘most external democracy
activists may indeed be primarily interested in achieving free and fair elections, they also
frequently hope that their efforts will increase the likelihood that autocrats will lose office’.
Gershman and Allen (2006) argue that the backlash against democracy promotion
stems largely from the fact that the so-called hybrid regimes have become a widespread
phenomenon across the globe. Hybrid regimes allowed enough political freedom, installed
regular elections, several opposition parties, allowed civil groups and NGOs to receive foreign
aid (discussed in Chapter 2). In 2004 the opposition groups in Ukraine mounted a significant
challenge to the ruling regime that has become to known as the Orange Revolution.
Thereafter, organizations and movements that monitor human rights and advocate the
expansion of democratic freedom have become a particular target of authoritarian
governments that have pursued systematic efforts to weaken or eliminate prodemocracy
activism, marginalize the press, curtail freedom of assembly and suppress civil society.
At a country level of analysis, Russia stands out as a clear case of the ruling regime
under former President Putin pursuing undemocratic actions in order to consolidate its
power and constrict freedom, largely as a responds to the recent wave of ‘color revolutions’ in
the neighboring Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Putin’s administration has denounced
external democracy aid and criticized local NGOs for accepting outside assistance (Chapter 4).
Governments of other former Soviet states like Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan and
Tajikistan, as well as China, states in Africa, and in South America have resorted to similar
policies.
Thus, what we have seen from above, as noted by a number of contemporary
democratization studies scholars, worldwide democratization processes are in tenuous
conditions. The prevailing discourse on contemporary democratization trends and Western
democracy promotion around the world motivates one to pay renewed attention to the concept
of democracy itself.
The analysis ponders the nature of modern democracy as a regime model, what it takes
for a regime to be considered democratic today. In the history of democracy, transformations
taking place since the 1970s have been quite extraordinary, through which democracy around
the world thrived and has proven its remarkable resilience and a widespread appeal. Liberal
democracy in particular has proven quite resilient due primarily to its ‘dual nature’(to be
discussed below).
This section further revisits the discourse on democracy’s global outreach and a
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related issue on whether or not there are strong ideological alternatives to democracy. On the
one hand there are those who argue that democracy’s universal appeal is unequivocal, as it
carries with it political, social, economic wellbeing for citizens around the world. On the other
hand, there are those scholars who are more susceptible to the latest democratic setbacks and
are more reserved about democracy’s global outreach. The present analysis stands in support
of the former view and asserts that despite the prevailing setbacks to global democratization in
recent times, democracy will continue to sustain its ideational2 appeal around the world well
into the future.
In turn, Western political and academic circles have been pondering whether or not
emerging alternative political models that display signs of illiberal and authoritarian values
are challenging Western liberal democracy? Are authoritarian values staging a comeback?
China’s development model has been doubted by commentators as an ‘authoritarian
capitalist’ (Gat 2007) alternative to democracy and has apparently become quite appealing to
a good number of developing countries for its ability to generate development without
undertaking democratic reforms. What is more worrisome is the degree of impressive
steadfastness that the authoritarian regimes such as one in China have demonstrated, a
phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘authoritarian resilience’. (Nathan, 2003) It is argued that
in the post-Tiananmen period, the Chinese leadership has been able to construct what
appears to be a stable archetypal authoritarian regime under conditions that elsewhere have
led to a democratic transition. The Chinese case might signify that “authoritarianism is a
viable regime form even under conditions of advanced modernization and integration with
the global economy” (Nathan 2003: 16).
However, some scholars are assured that in focusing overly on the sources of the
staying power of authoritarian regimes, there is a substantial neglect or undervalue of the
resilience of democracy itself. The idea is to look afresh at durability of democracy despite the
obstacles it has faced in the recent time. It is contended that: “no well-established or
consolidated democracies have been lost. In particular, in countries that have achieved high
levels of per capita GDP, there still has not been a single case of democratic breakdown”
(Plattner 2010: 82)
Merkel’s (2010:25) analysis on democratization trends on an aggregated global scale
reveals importantly that “most democracies within the category of ‘free’ states are relatively
the term is adopted from Burnell and Youngs 2010, in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linquistics the term
'ideational' refers to 'involving the representation of ideas', available from: www.highbeam.com/doc/1036ideational.html
2
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stable. A trend toward autocratic regimes can barely be expected.” The reason stems to a large
degree from the fact that democratic regimes continue to enjoy a high level of legitimacy at a
national level as well as internationally. Both international and regional organizations
endorse democracy; the United Nations in its official documents constantly articulates the
value of democracy for human rights and for peace.
Moreover, a large array of public opinion surveys demonstrates a high degree of
support for democracy worldwide. In particular, the World Values Survey is conducted about
every decade with the most recent being 1999-2001 in 80 diverse countries around the
world, accounting for about 80% of world population and represents one of the most
comprehensive data on attitudes concerning issues ranging from politics, national goals to
gender roles. The questions on democracy that the survey includes have an advantage of
being worded the same in every country. The Survey is used to supplement Freedom House
and Polity IV data.
The survey includes the following three main questions:
Do you agree with the following statement, “Democracy may have its problems, but it’s better
than any other form of government?”
Do you endorse the idea of a “Strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and
elections?”
Do you agree that “Greater respect for authority would be a good thing?”
The responses to these questions allow researchers to analyze the extent to which
democratic culture has developed or may develop in the future. With regards to the first
question, the survey results revealed that at least in principle, the belief that democracy is the
best system is overwhelming and omnipresent across the regions. “While there is a slightly
higher preference among the Western industrialized countries, in every region- even the
former Soviet Union – no less than 80 percent of people on average say democracy is the best
system” (Diamond 2008: 32). Thus, the saturation level of democratic values is obtained by
the means of measuring people's beliefs.
It appears further that the last two questions on a strong leader and authority, were
helpful in examining the claim that some cultures or regions are naturally more conducive to
the growth and consolidation of democracy. It has been found that there is a stronger
authoritarian temptation outside the West, with the idea of a 'strong leader' appealing to
almost half of respondents from the former Soviet Union and those in Latin American
countries. While the 'greater respect for authority' was found to be favored by majority in the
West, Asia, Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union and especially in Latin America and the
Middle East (Diamond 2008:33).
15
Apart from the World Values Survey, public opinion on the performance of regimes
and the economy is also obtained through periodic surveys, called 'barometers'. There are
four
different
regional
democracy
barometeres:
the
Afrobarometer
(www.afrobarometer.org), the East Asia Barometer (www.asianbarometer.org), the New
Europe
Barometer
(www.abdn.ac.uk/cspp)
and
the
Latinbarometer
(www.latinobarometro.org). These surveys include several types of questions that assess the
support for the idea of democracy. The latest empirical findings, based on the regional
‘barometers’ in the recently democratized countries revealed that on average, more than 64
per cent of respondents support the general idea of democracy. “In Benin, Thailand, Kenya
and Senegal this percentage increases to around 80 per cent of the people. The highest is
Senegal, where more than 87 per cent of respondents find democracy to be the best form of
government.” (Doorenspleet 2010)
Thus, high levels of support for democracy are rightly considered to be an essential
ingredient of democratic consolidation; political legitimacy is founded on citizens' approval of
a democratic regime. Increasingly there is a growing scholarly interest in the levels of support
vs. dissatisfaction with democracy in established democracies of the West and even more so
in the new democracies.
Revisiting the definition of democracy
In order to take democracy seriously and to understand its remarkable durability, it
suffices to revisit the concept itself. It is a case that more often than not the concept of
democracy tends to be rather narrowly interpreted, most frequently seen as just semi-regular
votes, thereby the true meaning of the world is being distorted. Democracy represents a
much-contested and very elusive concept and there is no agreement on how to define it
precisely and concretely. The definition most commonly used is that of Joseph Schumpeter
(1943): “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals
acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”.
Schumpeter’s widely influential theory of democracy has been described as being ‘minimalist’
for its emphasis of the importance of the institutional element in democracy, i.e. the primarily
role of competitive elections by which rulers are selected.
Democracy’s meaning becomes even more ambiguous if one refers to its etymological
origin in ancient Greek – “the power or rule of the people”. In recent decades, the
conceptualization of democracy takes on various forms in political science literature and no
other issues have been subjected to such an extensive scrutiny as has the issue of “what
16
democracy is…and is not” in Schmitter and Karl 1991’s analysis, who emphasize the
accountability of rulers to citizens and the relevance of mechanisms of competition other than
elections.
According to Tilly (2007), there are four main types of definitions that are implicitly or
explicitly referred to by scholars of democracy and democratization studies: constitutional,
substantive, procedural and process-oriented.
A constitutional approach defines political systems from looking at their legal systems,
making this approach vulnerable to error because of the common gaps between the content of
laws and actual practice. Substantive approaches look at what actually comes out of the
political system. If the system manages to produce popular control of the political agenda and
political equality it is deemed democratic no matter what the content of its laws or how it is
done. Procedural approaches on the contrary focus on governmental practices, first and
foremost if free and fair elections are conducted. Then, a process-oriented approach is
identified, as quite different from the other definitional strategies, which indicates sets of
processes that must take place for a situation to qualify as democratic. (Tilly 2007: 7-9) Thus
a process-oriented approach examines how a democratic political system works and is largely
built on Dahl’s classic criteria for democracy (or as he puts it, “polyarchy”).
Dahl had developed a procedural approach to the conceptualization of democracy,
establishing five criteria that an association would have to meet in order to satisfy the basic
principles of popular control and political equality. These are:
Effective participation: all the members must have equal and effective opportunities for
making their views known to the other members as to what the policy should be.
Voting equality: every member must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all
votes must be counted as equal.
Enlightened understanding: each member must have equal and effective opportunities for
learning about the relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences.
Control of the agenda: the members must have the exclusive opportunity to decide how and, if
they choose, what matters are to be placed on the agenda.
Inclusion of most adults: most adult permanent residents should have the full rights of citizens
implied by the above criteria. (Dahl 1998: 37-38)
The rights and freedoms articulated by Dahl point to a critical idea that for a regime to
be considered democratic today, apart from popular rule, it must account largely and
17
importantly for civil liberties and freedoms for individuals and minority groups. In order to be
accepted as a democratic regime, apart from providing for the rule of the majority as
articulated through free and fair elections, the protection of individual rights must be
guaranteed by a written constitution that effectively constrains government. Such type of
democracy is termed liberal or constitutional democracy. It is often claimed that the nature of
constitutional democracy is paradoxical, for there is a complex relationship between its main
components – the liberal (individual rights) and democratic pillar (majority rule).
Acknowledging the dual character of democracy with its often-conflicting goals of
majority rule and individual liberty, it is claimed that “it is a kind of hybrid regime, one that
tempers popular rule with anti-majoritarian features. For while it seeks to ensure the ultimate
sovereignty of the people, at the same time it limits the day-to-day rule of the majority so that
it does not infringe upon the rights of individuals or minorities”. (Plattner 2010: 84) As a
result given such an inherent compromise between its main pillars, it may appear highly
questionable how the liberal-democratic system endures and sustains itself, without creating
a unsettling discontent between majorities and minorities?
The “dual nature” inherent in liberal democracy is reflected in a constant tension and
requires continuous negotiations. Its success depends on a delicate balance that can be
broken by an extreme manifestation of either of its two components: the democratic disorder
called populism or the liberal disorder labeled “radical pluralism.” Both, however, can
reciprocally correct each other; their mutual cancellation may explain democratic resilience.
(ibid.: 91)
In fact it has been found that in the course of the last decade contemporary populism
has been emerging as a successful and sustained phenomenon across established democracies
of Western Europe. A wide circle of structural conditions have in combination provided a
breeding ground for a new populist Zeitgeist across Western Europe with populist
movements achieving impressive results in states like France, Switzerland and Denmark and
for the first time have become part of national government in countries such as Italy, Austria
and the Netherlands.
Across Western Europe, citizens have lost faith in traditional politics and its
representatives that in their eyes have failed to address critical issues such as economic and
cultural globalization. As a result disillusioned voters either become apathetic or turn to new,
radical alternatives. “Populist vowing to reclaim the scepter for its rightful owner- the
sovereign ‘people’- have been able to present themselves not as threat to Western European
democracy, but as its saviors.” (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008: 2) One can infer that despite
18
the fact that there exists a considerable support for democracy per se, faith in its agencies and
institutions is declining; people value democracy as an ideal but are quite dissatisfied with
how their political systems perform. Ergo, the growing tendency among researchers is to
focus on the negative aspects of how Western European democracies function (see for e.g.
Stoker 2006; Crouch 2004; Dalton and Wattenberg 2002; Diamond and Gunther 2001).
On the other hand of the spectrum, there is radical pluralism that is at work to different
degree in different democratic societies. Within a political context, pluralism stands for a
diversity of groups within the polity and its extreme form would threaten to undermine the
foundations of popular self-government for if a political consensus cannot be established
among various individuals and groups on the kinds of fundamental principles that should
govern the society, then majority rule will not be respected. Yet radical pluralism “helps to
hold in check the populist temptation, especially in the more advanced democracies.”
(Plattner 2010: 90)
Thus, it appears that the durability, functionality and appeal of liberal democracy in the
West could hardly be questioned and the central concern has been predominately about the
proper balance between liberal and democratic features of liberal democracy and the best
strategy for bringing both into being. This in turn spurs further debate on the best way to
encourage the growth of liberal democracy outside the West.
The world is dominated by the prevalence of what has been termed electoral (Diamond
1996) or illiberal (Zakaria 1997) democracies, i.e. those that choose their leaders in
competitive elections, yet fail to safeguard the basic rights of individual and minorities.
However, as recent statistical analyses reveal, most of the emerging democracies have
gradually become less illiberal, i.e. those regimes that are liberal are also competitive and
inclusive, whereas regimes that are not liberal, the levels of competition and participation are
very limited (Karatnycky 1999; Moller 2006).
Democracy - a universal value?
Scholars tend to be skeptical of the ideational appeal of democracy and its global
outreach. In 1996, writing with pessimism about the global prospects of liberal democracy,
Huntington asserted, “The West differs from other civilizations…in the distinctive character of
its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism,
individualism, and rule of law…In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar to the
West” and therefore he argued against exporting democratic ideals for now and for
foreseeable future (Huntington 1996: 311). Huntington’s thesis on uniqueness of the West
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and cultural arguments about the limits to democracy has been gaining momentum in recent
years once again.
Whether or not democracy is becoming a truly universal value, as was attributed by
Sen, remains an open-ended debate. It suffices to recall Sen’s main arguments in this regard.
In pondering the claim of democracy’s recognition as a universally relevant system, Sen
emphasized that the issue stands as a major revolution in thinking and one of the major
contributions of the twentieth century: “A country does not have to be deemed fit for
democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy.” (Sen 1999:4)
Sen argued that democracy has functioned well enough in the non-Western world, as
exemplified in case of vast and ethnically and religiously diverse India. Furthermore, Sen
scrutinizes a widespread argument that authoritarian regimes are better at economic
development than democratic systems, disqualifying the hypothesis for the lack of systematic
empirical studies and general evidence to support a claim that there is a general conflict
between political rights and economic performance.
This may involve asking how authoritarian states have performed as governments.
Brooker (2009) claims that the best way to go about this is to evaluate regimes in terms of
their own priorities and goals. Some argue that there is no authoritarian economic model per
se; that a spurious correlation exists between autocracy and growth (McFaul and Weiss,
2008). Indeed, the relationship between regime type and economy has been a subject of
extensive scholarly research for decades. Is democracy more conducive to economic
prosperity than authoritarianism? Does wealth inevitably lead to greater democratization or
is it democracy that causes countries to become richer? Scholars have compared the economic
trends and levels of development between democracies and autocracies.
A comprehensive study undertaken by Przeworski et al (2000) on the relationship
between economic development and regime type reveals that while economic development
does not directly cause democracy, democratic regimes nonetheless are more likely to survive
in rich societies. Ezrow and Frantz (2011:129) claim that the same argument applies to
dictatorships as they are too less likely to survive in poor countries, with “poverty having a
destabilizing effect on all regimes, regardless of whether they are democratic or dictatorial.”
It must be stressed that those authoritarian countries that have in fact achieved
extraordinary economic success, such as Taiwan, Korea, Chile, have seen significant political
transformations caused by raised popular demands for democratic government. So that even
economic success appears to have been the cause of weakening of these authoritarian
governments. Indeed, democracy should be seen as providing a desirable complement, even a
20
prerequisite for an enduring and sustainable economic growth.
What exactly does democracy offer to claim its universality? Sen identified a number of
distinct virtues of democracy, arguing that these enrich the lives of the citizens. Democracy’s
merits include the idea that political and social rights have an intrinsic value for human
wellbeing and in denying participation in the political life of the community; a good life of
individuals as social beings is being seriously undermined. By the same token, democracy
hold a crucial instrumental value in providing people with an opportunity to voice their
claims, including claims of economic needs, and has constructive importance in formation of
values and priorities of society, in the understanding of needs, rights and duties, including
exchange of information and views, open public discussion in forging informed an considered
choices.
Sen further takes on the argument on cultural differences, including ‘Asian values’
discourse and how these might gauge the debate on democracy’s global applicability. In Sen’s
view, no cultural limits to freedom exist and democracy is not an intrinsic attribute to a
Western tradition. (ibid.: 15) As it is well known the prime supporter of the view that there
are cultural limits to democracy has been Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime prime minister of
Singapore. Lee’s cultural skepticism has been backed up by a considerable number of
scholarly works promoting the idea that the distinctive Asian values are not compatible with
Western liberal notions of democracy.
In particular, some state that: “there are morally legitimate alternatives to Westernstyle liberal democracy in the East Asian region. What is right for East Asians does not simply
involve implementing Western-style political practices when the opportunity presents itself;
it involves drawing upon East Asian political realities and cultural traditions that are
defensible to contemporary East Asians. They may also be defensible to contemporary
Western-style liberal democrats, in which case they may be worth learning from.” (Bell 2006:
8) Thus, the principles and practices of non-Western political traditions can to a considerable
degree enrich liberal democracy.
Ideological alternatives to democracy, are they strong?
While the discourse on universality of democracy may trigger contra views, it appears
that posing a somewhat different but relevant question may shed more light on the nature of
modern democracy and its unshakeable appeal as a regime model. Namely, do ideological
challenges to democracy exist? This ultimately brings the discussion back to Fukuyama’s
famous thesis on Western liberal democracy being the highest and final political form to
21
which humanity can aspire?
Three weeks after the September 11 attacks, Fukuyama stated in an article in the Wall
Street Journal that his “end of history” thesis remained valid twelve years after he first
presented it, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s core argument was that
after the defeat of communism and National Socialism, no serious ideological competitor to
Western-style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political
philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the evolutionary process. To be sure, there will be
wars and terrorism, but no alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously
challenge the ideas and values of Western liberal democracy as the “dominant organizing
principles” around the world. In particular, Fukuyama points out that non-democratic rival
ideologies such as radical Islam and “Asian values” have little appeal outside their own
cultural areas, and these areas are themselves vulnerable to penetration by Western
democratic ideas. (Fukuyama 2001).
Being one of the leading critics of Fukuyama’s hypothesis, Kagan (2008) has been
recently claiming that Western liberal democracy is being challenged by sustainable
alternatives – authoritarian states, seeking to play a greater role on the world stage while
tightening their grip on power domestically. In his latest book “The return of history and the
end of dreams”, Kagan stressed the continuing importance of ideology in shaping the foreign
policies of nations, determining their ambitions. The book is a referral to Fukuyama’s famous
1992 volume “The End of History and the Last Man”. Kagan points out that a peaceful
international order envisioned by the end of the Cold War was an illusion; it did not lead to
‘the end of history’ – a universal acceptance of liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.
According to Kagan, the existing state of global politics is characterized by the great
power rivalries, while ideological clashes remain significant, with western liberal democracy
(the US and Europe) facing stronger competitive ideologies in the face of autocratic regimes.
Indeed, Kagan gives much emphasis to the rise of China and Russia, as two ambitious
great powers. Russia has undergone a transformation, which has produced a tremendous
political and economic turnaround, while China is undertaking massive economic reforms and
a large-scale program to modernize its military. Kagan states that it is important to remember
that these great powers are autocracies that seek to modernize economically without opening
up their political spaces. This has great implications for the international system. ‘True
realism about international affairs means understanding that a nation’s foreign policy is
heavily shaped by the nature of its government’, Kagan writes (p.98).
22
Kagan’s analysis of both Russia and China seems to suggest that these are very similar
countries with similar traditional power ambitions and similar ideologies guiding their
domestic and foreign policies, both seeking more relative power for themselves. He states,
‘[i]n the great schism between democracy and autocracy, the autocrats share common
interests and a common view of international order’ (p.70). But this is debatable. For in many
salient respects Russia and China are quite dissimilar from each other. Indeed, even
geopolitical realists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski have regularly warned that there are bound
to be tensions in the relationship between these two enormous and culturally distinct states
that share a common border.
Kagan’s treatment of China is also questionable. Kagan describes China as ‘a rising
geopolitical and economic giant…[that] has behaved like rising powers before it’ (p. 25),
claiming that it is a growing power with enormous geopolitical ambitions and that as its
external interests and commitments expand, they will begin to collide with those of other
great powers. But the source of China’s power is primarily economic, and whether it will
experience a ‘peaceful rise’ is a matter of great debate. While it is true that throughout history
the emergence of new power centers in world politics has triggered instability, at the same
time it must be noted that as long as American hegemony remains ‘non-threatening’, China
will not seek to “balance” against the US.
What must be further acknowledged is the nature of the global economy today:
economic productivity depends on institutions, property rights, and political stability, on a
complex and interconnected global economy. Large countries such as China benefit from the
current state of economic play, and remain firmly embedded in the ‘globalized’ international
economy. While possessing a substantial share of global trade (at 10.4% in 2010) China is
primarily concerned to preserve the sources of its economic growth. Kagan’s downplaying of
these realities is the central weakness of his analysis. That is, he considerably underestimates
the forces of globalization and economic interdependence that draw together those
democracies and autocracies which Kagan considers to form two antithetical camps. True that
both Russia and China are regimes that are intensely resisting Western democracy promotion,
and aiming to exert influence around the world, thereby creating significant obstacles to
further democratization (Chapter 3). Yet, even such regimes describe themselves as
democracies or claim that they are on the slow road to becoming a democracy.
Among the autocratic revival scholars, Kagan is certain the most extreme with his
attempt to tie a regime type to geopolitical ambitions of major powers. Juxtaposed to the
autocratic revival theorists, there are those who argue that at the present moment democracy
23
faces rather weak challenges at the ideological level. Deudney and Ikenberry (2009) argue
that autocratic revival is generally a myth; autocracy is not a viable alternative within the
global capitalist system. “Although today’s autocracies may be more competent and more
adept at accommodating capitalism than their predecessors were, they are nonetheless
fundamentally constrained by deep-seated incapacities that promise to limit their viability
over the long run…due to deep contradictions between authoritarian political systems and
capitalist economic systems”.
Ottaway (2009) in particular points out that the main obstacle to democracy is to be
found in the political realm with the endurance of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian
regimes, weak, incompetent and divided opposition parties and movements, insubstantial
external pressure on the part of democratic states, and misguided efforts by international
community to promote democracy. She argues that such political challenges are strong and
may even be getting stronger, whereas the ideological challenges to democracy are weak and
are not the cause for the failure of democratic transformations worldwide.
Ottaway argues further that democracy itself is not a full-fledged ideology in a classic
sense with a proclaimed value system and socio-economic model. Instead what we witness
today overall is that there are no coherent ideologies with a comprehensive political, social
and economic agendas, what they provide are rather fragmented ideas and dispersed appeals.
These include Islamism, nationalism in many parts of the world, socialism and the so-called
boutique ideologies, which offer specialized ideological responses to specialized problems.
Thus, “a weak democratic ideology meets the challenge of other weak or fragmented
ideologies. The fight for democracy is political rather than ideological.” (p.44) Indeed, such a
political contest for democracy largely explains the present-day democratization setbacks
around the world and ultimately means that democracy will be able to preserve its ideational
appeal in the world for a time to come.
Sustaining democracy and making it work for people’s socio-political and economic
wellbeing is a formidable undertaking of the twenty first century. The discourse on the
essential nature of modern liberal democracy and democratization endures. The process of
democratization is a complex and dynamic one, with a perennial risk of reversal; democratic
arrangements are fragile and vulnerable. Furthermore, as Geddes (1999) emphasizes, ‘the
process of democratization varies enormously from case to case and region to region.
Generalizations proposed have failed either to accommodate all the real-world variations or
to explain it’ (p.117).
Geddes contribution is highly significant for its emphasis on the need to differentiate
24
between authoritarian regimes in an effort to explain regime transitions. She argues that
authoritarian regimes break down in systematically different ways depending on their
essential characteristics and types, those of personalist, military, single-party or amalgams of
the pure types. Geddes’ analysis is one of the most influential contributions to the literature
on nondemocratic regimes.
All in all, as we can observe from the above analysis, the idea that the worldwide
democratization process has come to a halt has become a truism. Another truism could be that
global democracy promotion is in a strenuous condition. Yet another potential truism could be
that authoritarianism is here to stay, having the ability to adopt itself to a changing
environment.
The democratization literature has accumulated an extensive knowledge about the
domestic and international factors that contribute to political change in authoritarian
regimes. Some of the most influential theories of democratization accumulated in the last 20
years during the so-called ‘third wave of academic interest in democratization’ (Geddes 1999)
have established as a matter of fact that democracy is more likely in more developed
countries, i.e. that a positive yet unexplained relationship between development and
democracy exists (Jackman 1973; Bollen 1979; Burkhart and Lewis-Beck 1994; Przeworski
and Limongi 1997).
Another widely acknowledged finding is that poor economic performance increases
the likelihood of authoritarian breakdown, as it increases democratic breakdown and defeat
of incumbents in stable democracies, i.e. that there is a relationship between economic crisis
and regime change (Diamond and Linz 1989; Bermeo 1990; Haggard and Kaufman 1995;
Przeworski and Limongi 1997). What has been largely neglected in the above presented
literature, however, is how and why a good number of authoritarian regimes remain and
endure in international system. According to Geddes (2009) there is a lack of theoretical and
empirical research on the interaction between international factors and the behavior of
domestic political actors and should these be elaborated, it “could potentially transform the
study of democratization”.
In the light of this, chapters 2 and 3 that follow will focus specifically on the study of
authoritarian regimes, examining an existing, even if quite recent, literature that deals
specifically with factors that contribute to their survival and the existing and potential role
they play on international stage. In particular, this study seeks to highlight a much-neglected
international dimension of authoritarian endurance and it will be argued that external factors
play a significant role in prolonging and strengthening authoritarian rule as well. While
25
scholars have shown an increasing interest in the external or international dimension of
authoritarianism, including the so-called ‘autocracy promotion’ to be discussed in Chapter 3,
the interest and research have so far remained quite limited and call the need for further
examination.
26
“More theoretical analysis needs to be directed at understanding the persistence of
authoritarianism, rather than focusing primarily on what causes democracy”
Thomas Ambrosio (2009)
Chapter 2: Sketching a framework of authoritarianism: sources of resilience
The present analysis focuses on the theoretical and empirical findings in comparative
politics and regime study literature pertaining to the study on contemporary non-democratic
regimes. The analysis presented here examines current literature that deals with the question of
why and how authoritarian regimes remain resilient in the evolving international system. This
involves an examination of both domestic and external sources of their survival.
The literature presented in fact reveals that given a prevalence of certain conditions
authoritarian regimes can last: authoritarianism is not merely a transitional phase before
democracy. This in turns calls for the need to continue thoroughly studying non-democratic
regimes. The chapter begins with an overview of how the study on authoritarian regimes, of a
new non-traditional type, has gained prominence within the field of comparative politics and
regimes studies literature in the late 1990s. Part II outlines specific factors that contribute to
authoritarianism’s staying power, on domestic as well as international level.
Part 1. The contours of the field of study
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an extensive literature has emerged on the
causes and consequences of democratization and issues of democratic consolidation, whereas
research on emergence and persistence of nondemocratic regimes has been quite scant in
regime studies and transition literature. As a result, there has been a disproportionate focus
on those processes that contribute to greater democratization rather than the resilience of
non-democratic forms of rule. This has been largely explained, as outlined in Chapter I, by the
Zeitgeist of democratic optimism and universalism following the explosive wave of
democratization after 1989.
The studies on regime change in comparative political science have largely focused on
the developments in Latin America, Southern Europe, and in aftermath of the breakup of the
Soviet Union, on the post-Soviet Eurasia, and initially considered these as a case of ‘transition
to democracy’, or ‘transition from authoritarian rule’. Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe
Schmitter in their 1986 seminal work on transitions away from authoritarianism contend that
autocrats “can justify themselves in political terms only as transitional powers” (p.15). Most
27
of authoritarian regimes were allowing some form of ‘political liberalization’, which involved
allowing individual expression and opposition organization. They have argued that such
liberalization would lead to democratization; notoriously, in the words of Samuel Huntington
“liberalized authoritarianism is not a stable equilibrium; the halfway house does not stand”
(1991:174)3.
At that time the Western democracy promotion community had embraced an
analytical model of global democratic transition, based on the idea that the third wave
countries are on their way along a democratization sequence towards becoming full-blown
democracies. However, in time the spread of democratization slowed down, and theorists of
regime change have began to put more emphasis on the concept of democratic consolidation
and sorting the cases into categories reflecting degrees of democratization (the leading
scholars in this field include Huntington 1991; Diamond and Plattner 1993; Bratton and Van
de Walle 1997; Bunce 2003).
Parallel to the proliferation of both transition and consolidation paradigms, a distinct
direction in scholarship of comparative politics has emerged, which began to examine those
political regimes that couple formal democratic institutions with authoritarian practices. In
countries across the former Soviet Union, in North Africa and the Middle East, in Sub-Saharan
Africa and in South and East Asia, there was an initial democratic opening, with free and fair
elections in place, yet what have emerged over time were new forms of authoritarianism.
Contemporary authoritarian regimes as distinct
Properly characterizing such regime types spawned a number of distinct conceptual
strategies. One way scholars have chosen to make sense of regimes that combine democratic
and authoritarian features is to position them at the very center between the two endpointsdemocracy and authoritarianism – and began examining the properties of so-called ‘hybrid
regimes’. The term ‘hybrid regimes’, introduced by Diamond (2002)4, denoting regimes that
are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian that emerged out of a
widespread observation of an increasing number of countries around the world taken on
democratic features, at least superficially.
These regimes are exhibiting some degree of political pluralism coupled with
multiparty elections and are dubbed “pseudodemocracies”, because as Diamond argues, the
See also DiPalma 1990; Przeworski 1991
See also Karl 1995 and R ü b 2002, who argued that hybrid regimes are a separate type of a regime distinct
from democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes all together.
3
4
28
term ‘resonates distinctively with the contemporary era, in which democracy is the only
broadly legitimate regime form, and regimes have felt unprecedented pressure (international
and domestic) to adopt-or at least to mimic-the democratic form’ (p.24). Hybrid regimes have
seen a worldwide expansionary trend, surpassing far more the trend toward democracy.
In seeking to explore in-depth the notion of hybrid regimes, Morlino (2012:49, 67)
ponders whether “when considering those phases of uncertainty and ambiguity, are we
dealing with an institutional arrangement with some, perhaps minimal, degree of
stabilization, namely a regime in a proper sense; or are we actually analyzing transitional
phases from some kind of authoritarianism (or traditional regime) to democracy or vice
versa?” He argues that hybrid regimes, while appearing as ambiguous forms of political
organization are nonetheless “a substantial reality that can be considered an autonomous
model of regime vis-à-vis democracy, authoritarianism, and the traditional regime.”
This phenomenon has made apparent the fact that a great number of regimes are no
longer ‘in transition’ to democracy as has been argued within the field of ‘transitology’ and
constitute a new authoritarian kind that evidently is here to stay. Carothers (2002) rejects the
transition paradigm as simplistic, conceptually incorrect approach that has outlived its
applicability of the early days of the third wave of democratization. He usefully points to the
diversity of political patterns among the so-called ‘transitional countries’, most of which have
displayed few signs of democratizing and their political trajectories should be understood as
“alternative directions, not way stations to liberal democracy”(p: 14).
Similarly, Linz (2000) called for a conceptual clarity in properly classifying hybrid
regimes, avoiding labeling these as democracies, even using minimum standards. He
proposed “the addition of adjectives to ‘authoritarianism’ rather than to ‘democracy’ (p. 34).
Thus, the transition paradigm has been undermined primarily for its teleological assumptions,
for its overreliance on elections as a proxy for democracy, and its disregard for important
sociopolitical and economic preconditions that may influence political trajectories.
Carothers (2000) identifies distinct ‘semi-authoritarian’ regimes as those that ‘follow
some of the forms of democracy yet maintain sufficient limits on political openness to ensure
they are in no real danger of losing their grip on power…and are certain to constitute a major
feature of the international political landscape of the next several decades’ (p.210). There is a
complex political dualism at play in the workings of a semi-authoritarian regime, so that while
adopting the basic institutional forms of democracy (i.e., elections, independent national
legislature, independent judiciary, a democratic constitution, opposition political groups,
independent civil society groups, some independent media), such regimes apply a successful
29
strategy of controlling the levers of political power. Interestingly, Carothers argues that the
core meaning of the term ‘semi-authoritarianism’ implies not a failure to reach full democracy
but a regime’s deliberate and active strategy to sustain itself.
Ottaway (2003) in a similar way points to the deliberate character of semiauthoritarian regimes as not failed democracies or democracies in transition but rather as
‘carefully constructed and maintained alternative systems’ (p.7).
She places semi-
authoritarian regimes as a distinct regime type, and argues that it is wrong to regard these as
transitional regimes and study them solely within the discussions on democratization.
Brooker (2000, 2009) introduces the concept of ‘disguised dictatorship’ as an instance
of nondemocratic governance with the presence of semi-competitive elections forming its
distinctive, defining feature. A dictatorship that claims to be ‘democratic’ is a new kind of a
non-democratic instance, which differs from traditional types by “avoiding open rivalry with
democracy and adopting an ‘if you can’t beat them, (appear) to join them’ approach” (2009:
6).
Following Diamond’s, Carothers’ and Linz’s analyses, Levistky and Way (2002, 2010)
have usefully warned analysts that hybrid regimes might be thought of not just as
insufficiently democratic democracies but as ‘insufficiently authoritarian autocracies’. They
have developed a concept of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ to account for those regimes that
have emerged out of broken down full-blown authoritarian regimes. The relevant cases of
interest include Russia under Putin, Croatia under Tudjman, Serbia under Milosevic, Ukraine
under Kuchma, Peru under Fujimori, Haiti, Albania, Armenia, Mexico and Zambia during the
1990s.
What distinguishes ‘competitive authoritarianism’ from other types of nondemocratic
outcomes is that political authority is primarily obtained and exercised through formal
democratic institutions. Such regimes fail to meet conventional minimum standards of
democracy, for the ruling elites constantly and extensively violate democratic rules, by
abusing state resources, denying the opposition adequate media coverage, harassing
opposition candidates and their supporters and often manipulating electoral results. A
political system becomes electoral authoritarian when violations of the ‘minimum criteria for
democracy’ are so severe that they create ‘an uneven playing field between government and
opposition’ (2010: 10). Such type of hybrid regime stands in the very middle between
democracy and full-scale authoritarianism.
Moreover, opposition forces may have at their disposal arenas of contestation as the
means to challenge the ruling incumbents, namely the electoral arena, the legislature, the
30
judiciary and the media (Levistky and Way, 2002: 54). As the authors suggest such type of
authoritarian regime may prove to be long-drawn-out with inherent contradiction in
coexistence of democratic rules and autocratic methods remaining intact and manageable by
the authority.
Through an extensive empirical research, involving a comparative study of 35 cases in
Africa, Asia, the Americas, and post-communist Eurasia, they have quite successfully identified
specific factors – domestic and international (described below in more detail) – that explain
competitive authoritarian regime trajectories. While the analysis presented by Levistky and
Way focuses specifically on one type of an authoritarian outcome and on one specific
historical period, namely the post-Cold War era, their overall framework of study can be
constructively applied in order to discern the sources of authoritarian stability in general.
Levistky and Way’s concept of competitive authoritarianism closely resembles the
concept of ‘electoral authoritarianism’, developed primarily by Schedler (2002, 2006), as yet
another attempt to break away from the transition paradigm and avoid conceptualizing nondemocratic regimes through the prism of democracy. The ‘third wave’ of global
democratization has led to the creation of some types of democracy, yet at the same time gave
birth to new forms of authoritarianism that cannot be categorized the same way as classic types
of one-party, military, or personal dictatorship. With the goal of delineating and categorizing
regimes, Schedler, following Diamond (2002), outlines a regional distribution of political
regimes in the developing world, stressing that more than half of all countries lay in an
authoritarian realm with electoral authoritarians (EA) becoming the most common regime
type, making more than two-thirds (69.9 percent) of all autocracies. The EA regimes are
presented in the Arab countries, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
(2002:p.48)
The new electoral authoritarian regimes of the post-Cold War era represent a form of
nondemocratic governance that conduct regular multiparty elections at all levels of
government at the same time acutely and systematically violating basic democratic standards.
Unlike closed authoritarian regimes (such as Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan),
these regimes have embraced a complete list of liberal-democratic institutions: apart from
holding multiparty elections on regular basis, the regimes have put in place constitutions, the
courts, legislatures, and agencies of accountability, judicial systems, federal arrangements,
independent media and civic associations. Thus, institutionally speaking, such regimes are
nearly identical to liberal democracies.
31
As Schedler (2002) emphasizes, it is not a straightforward undertaking to draw a clear
boundary between electoral democracies on the one hand and electoral authoritarianism on
the other. For, in principle, any democratic regime must adhere to a consistent set of minimal
democratic norms, and once one of the constitutive norms is bridged, a regime cannot be
regarded as a democratic one. However, empirically there is no division of regimes into clearcut types, because ‘democratic norms are not perfectly realized anywhere, even in advanced
democracies’ (p.38). Yet, it is clear that what distinguishes electoral authoritarians from their
liberal democratic counterparts are the tools of substantive control and manipulation of the
representative institutions (What kind of tools precisely will be examined in Part II of this
chapter). Historically, autocrats have resorted to using elections to sustain themselves5, yet
what is new in the practices of the contemporary authoritarians is the way electoral
manipulations are undertaken.
Schedler (2010) contends that these nondemocratic regimes represent ‘the last line of
authoritarian defense in a long history of struggle that has been unfolding since the invention
of modern representative institutions’ (p.69). Schedler further argues that in the long run the
very same representative institutions can play a significant role in weakening the
authoritarian regimes, in that they are inevitably granted at least a minimal range of power
and autonomy and thus there also appears an arena of contention and ‘the possibility of
eroding authoritarian stability and governance’ (p.77). Overall, there is a continuing propensity
among democratization scholars to argue for an inevitable liberalization of those institutions
that authoritarian regimes borrow from democratic countries and that processes of
globalization and interconnectedness it fosters take on a homogenizing tendencies.
The notions of competitive authoritarian regimes and electoral authoritarians both
resemble Magaloni’s (2006) concept of ‘hegemonic-party autocracy’, defined as ‘a system in
which one political party remains in office uninterruptedly under semi-authoritarian
conditions while holding regular multiparty elections’, in which opposition parties are
allowed to regularly participate (p.32). The findings are based on the extensive analysis of the
Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), proven to be one of the most resilient
authoritarian regimes, having retained control of government for 71 years from 1929 until its
demise in 2000 when it lost the office of the presidency to the National Action Party (PAN).
Magaloni develops a theory of hegemonic party survival that addresses the question of how a
5
This has been argued earlier by for example Linz 1975; Hermet 1978; Chehabi and Linz 1998; Remmer 1999
32
hegemonic party manages to solve elite disputes and keep the party united and why would
voters support an autocratic regime?
Throughout its rule, PRI had managed to stay in power through regular multiparty
elections by securing for itself a monopoly of mass electoral support in order to deter elite
division and had manipulated institutions by controlling constitutional change. In particular,
material goods and services were a central component of securing mass electoral support and
dissuading elite divisions. As Magaloni notes, such multiparty elections autocracies are the
most common form of authoritarian regime in the world, displacing single-party, military
dictatorships, and monarchies and prevailing after the end of the Cold War.
We have seen above how Levisky and Way, Shedler and Magaloni among others
ponder the dynamics of electoral politics in authoritarian regimes. Indeed it is clear from their
analyses that authoritarianism with elections may not lead to democratization, at the same
time, elections, manipulated as they are by the authorities, do not guarantee that autocrats are
protected in their grip on power. With the scholarly interest in authoritarian regimes dynamics
proliferating, an enduring predisposition to view such regimes as diminished forms of democracy
was no longer the order of the day.
The study of nondemocratic regimes, of traditional and more contemporary forms,
remains of utmost relevance and a growing number of recent studies have taken seriously the
fact that non-democratic rule is here to stay. These have addressed the question of why and
how such form of rule continues to persist in an age of democratization. The field
encompasses a wide array of theoretical approaches seeking to explain and categorize such
form of rule.
Traditionally, there are theories of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, approaches
that deal with types of non-democratic rule such as military rule, the personal-rule of a
monarch or a dictator, there is also the ‘one party state’ institutional approach. These have
been extensively explored in the works of Arendt (1951), Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956),
Huntington and Moore (1970), Linz (1975), Purcell (1973), Anderson (1970), Schneider
(1971), Schmitter (1971), among others who have examined the identity of rulers and their
modes of governance and legitimation. These works on political authoritarianism have sprung
as a result of an increasing number of countries having come under authoritarian rule in the
late 60s’-early 1970s and a growing awareness that authoritarian regimes were a category of
their own. In his analysis, Linz (1975) examined the structure of power relations (monism vs.
pluralism), strategies of legitimation (ideologies vs. mentalities), and the treatment of subjects
33
(mobilization vs. depoliticization) in drawing a distinction between totalitarianism and
authoritarian rule.
Of the more contemporary typologies of authoritarian regimes, one of the most widely
used and quoted typology of authoritarian regimes is that of Geddes (2003), who classifies
regimes as personalist, military, single-party, or amalgams of these three. The main emphasis
here is on institution structures that define elite politics in authoritarian regimes in order to
discern which actors and institutions have access to political office and influence over policy,
be it a single leader, a hegemonic party or the military.
Brooker’s (2009) is yet another instance of a more recent typology of nondemocratic
rule. He frames the study of non-democratic regimes by the means of a three-dimensional
approach that involves examining – ‘who rules?’, ‘how do they rule?’, and ‘why do they rule?’
He cogently argues that any study of non-democratic regimes of past and present has to adapt
such a ‘mixed’ theoretical approach ‘in order to deal with the diversity of these regimes’
(p.44). However Brooker further stresses that in studying the present and potential nondemocratic regimes, the classical ‘who rules?’ approach becomes the most relevant. The ‘how’
and ‘why’ approaches have become less relevant because “so many regimes have policy
orientations and performances that are similar to their democratic counterparts and…are
using democratic ideology and institutions as the basis for their claim to legitimacy” (p.276).
At the same time he cautions against generalizing about a large array of non-democratic
regimes and calls for the need to provide qualifications that differentiate between types of
such regimes.
Does classifying authoritarian regimes into different types help explain their survival
and/or breakdown? Brownlee (2007) cautions that “a flurry of new typologies outpaces the
development and confirmation of explanations, these new authoritarian subtypes risk
becoming an intellectual cul-de-sac…the fresh branding of old regimes does not necessarily
illuminate the going-on of the world’s autocracies or explain why so many still stand”(p.2527).
On the other hand, Hadenius and Teorell (2006) argue that indeed propensities to
survive and to develop towards democracy depend on the nature of an authoritarian regime.
Largely building on Geddes (2003) typology, they present a new typology of authoritarian
regime types of 191 countries in 1972-2003 periods; there are five general regimes types:
monarchical, military, no-party, one party, and multiparty. Each of these types has its own
average life span. A strong correlation has been found to exist between years of executive
tenure and the life span of authoritarian regimes. In particular, what they term as a ‘limited
34
multiparty regime, one that holds parliamentary or presidential elections in which (at least
some) candidates are able to participate who are independent of the ruling regime’, becoming
the most common type of authoritarianism since the early 1990s, is also the one most fragile
(p.7). Monarchical regime type, on the other hand, is the most stable form of authoritarianism.
At the same time, Hadenius and Teorell contend that the breakdown of an
authoritarian regime, in case of all the types presented, does not automatically lead to
democratization and that in fact more often than not collapsed authoritarian regimes are
replaced by yet another authoritarian regime (77 percent of cases in the time span under
investigation, with 23 percent resulting in democracy). This applies predominantly to the
governing monarchies and traditional one-party states, whereas the multiparty system is the
one likely to democratize in a gradual way.
Similarly to both Brooker’s and Hadenius and Teorell’s emphases on the need to
account for an authoritarian regime type, Snyder (2006) argues that the growing literature on
non-democratic regimes overly concentrates on the electoral politics and competition and as
a result other significant dimensions are not taken into consideration. These are the so-called
‘extra-electoral’ factors, according to Snyder, that constitute: the types of rulers (e.g. military,
personal leader, or a political party), the means of non-democratic rule, mainly through
patronage networks, ethnic ties, or mass parties, and the motives that drive rules in their
quest for power (e.g., greed, religion, ideology), and the degree of rule.
Thus there is a need for a broader conceptual framework that incorporates not only
electoral processes but, quite importantly, how these electoral processes interact with ‘extraelectoral’ dimensions of non-democratic rule. Indeed, elections alone are not enough as a factor
in understanding the regime dynamics.
Being influenced by Geddes’ (2003) classification of regime, Ezrow and Frantz (2011)
comprehensively address the workings of authoritarian politics and emphasize that there are
clear distinctions to be made between numerous types of dictatorships; in turn different types
of them produce differing kinds of policies and outcomes. At the same time it is argued that a
clear distinction equally has to be made between dictators and dictatorships in order to
discern and distinguish the difference in strategies that motivate leaders and elite, with
authoritarian regimes commonly surviving long after the tenure of any one leader. “Whereas
regime longevity involves a complex and system-wide effort to ensure the satisfaction of elites
and the regimes’ mass constituents, leadership longevity centers on the ability of leaders to
please their elite constitutes and deter elite defections.” (p.81)
35
Bratton and van de Walle (1997) argue that personalist type of authoritarian regime is
largely dependent on the transfer of material rewards in exchange for political support.
Wright’s (2008) argument is similar in pointing out that patron-client networks are
established in personalist autocracies, which are strengthened by the means of formal
political institutions.
By definition, a single individual dominates the political apparatus in a personalist
authoritarian regime and “when the dictator dies, personal dictatorships are unlikely to
survive, as there are few institutionalized methods for dealing with crises over succession”
(Ezrow and Frantz 2011:61). In similar vein, Geddes (1999) argues that personalist
dictatorships are unlikely to be succeeded by a democratic regime, with violent transitions
often typical, by way of assassination, coup, revolution, or foreign intervention.
Moreover, Ezrow and Frantz (2011:50) argue that there is a correlation between the
type of authoritarian regime and how it is represented regionally in the world with military
regimes largely found in Latin America; personalist regimes more common in sub-Saharan
Africa; Eastern Europe and East and Southeast Asia are more dominated by single-party
regimes, and the Middle East is largely represented by monarchies.
As Merkel (2010:28) emphasizes “whatever typology of autocratic rule may be
constructed, indicators of modernization and conditions related to culture, society and the
state suggest that a relatively stable autocratic camp has emerged. There may be oscillations
between different forms of autocratic rule, but there are no theoretical or empirical hints that
signal notable changes towards sustainable democratization.” Thus as we have seen,
comparative politics scholars have been developing new concepts and data to address one of the
central issues in the field, namely what shape and form authoritarian rule takes on.
Understanding the essence of authoritarian rule is crucial in order to comprehend regime
dynamics, causes, consequences and possibilities of change, if any, towards democracy.
Part 2. Why and how authoritarian regimes last?
A. The internal factors
Increasingly scholars of comparative politics and regime studies have begun to
undertake in-depth research of precisely why and how contemporary authoritarian regimes
last, beyond considering solely the electoral process. There are studies carried out on the
sustainability of authoritarian regimes that focus on the mechanisms of control and the
domestic pressures facing those regimes, revealing a number of institutional and contingent
36
sources of regime durability. While the literature on democratization has predominantly
focused on the role of the opposition, i.e. civil society, insurgency, mass protests, in examining
which domestic factors undermine authoritarianism and/or foster democracy6, the main
studies on authoritarianism put much more emphasis on the ruling elites’ capacity to withstand
opposition challenges and foster regime endurance. According to Svolik (2009), in nearly 80
percent of cases autocrats are ousted from power by the very same elite that had provided
support in the first place.
Bueno de Mesquita et. al. (2003) argue that in authoritarian regimes a principle
challenge originates from within the political elite. Thus, the ruling authorities must be on a
constant watch in order to prevent ambitious associates from power take over. What kinds of
instruments are at the disposal of autocrats in order to survive in office? In examining the
channels through which authoritarian regimes stay in power, Gandhi and Przeworski (2006,
2007) argue that autocrats have at their disposal two instruments to mobilize cooperation
and prevent rebellion: policy concessions and distribution of rents-monetary rewards, perks,
and privileges. And it is through political institutions, such as legislature, parties and
elections, that autocrats purposefully establish and maintain, that cooperation is mobilized.
Partisan legislatures, as nominally-democratic institutions, serve to foster rulers’
survival by means of broadening the basis of support for them by incorporating potential
opposition forces. Legislatures are found to be well-suited institutional mechanism through
which non-democratic rulers make policy concessions to elicit cooperation and avert
rebellion. Those opposition groups that are allowed to participate in the legislature do so
within institutional framework of rules established by the ruler.
These so-called ‘institutionalized dictatorships’, resembling ‘electoral authoritarians’
discussed above, as regimes that exhibit seemingly democratic institutions but remain nondemocracies precisely because elections they hold are not fair, held with the purpose to
‘intimidate any potential opposition’; because legislative initiatives of the executive are almost
always approved and passed, because ‘the outcomes of the legislative process, legally
constituted by the dictator, can be reversed by the same dictator’ (2006:p.22). Lust-Okar
(2004) takes up the issues of ‘co-optation’ of opposition by ruling elites and argues that
paradoxically the opposition is weakened significantly when it is co-opted into the regime
apparatus, for it is given an opportunity to take part in the system, largely by being assigned a
political post.
See for example Fish(1995), Bratton and van de Walle (1997), Diamond(1999), Collier (1999), Wood(2000),
Thompson(2001), Beissinger( 2002),
6
37
Following Gandhi and Przeworski, Magaloni (2008) takes the issue of how precisely
does an autocrat manages to remain in office much further. She develops an in-depth theory
of power-sharing under authoritarianism, and ways in which it influences regime longevity.
The fundamental argument is that an autocrat, wanting to remain in power, is compelled to
establish power-sharing arrangements with the elite, arrangements that must be outright
credible. For the power-sharing deal to be credible, the autocrat must ‘give up his absolute
powers to select members of the ruling clique into government positions...to those who invest
in the existing institutions rather than in subversive coalitions’ (p. 716).
Magaloni argues that the institution of regular multiparty elections can play a
significant role in strengthening the bargaining power of the ruling party in its power-sharing
relation with the autocrat. In addition, based on ‘a survival analysis of autocracies’, party
autocracies are more stable than military regimes and that single-party regimes have a higher
longevity than hegemonic-party autocracies. Magaloni builds on Geddes (1999), who
emphasizes the role of political parties in prolonging authoritarian rule. Geddes argues that a
strong party fosters elite cohesion by means of distributing patronage. Managing intra-elite
conflict is critical, because elite defection very often leads to authoritarian breakdown.
By the same token, Brownlee’s (2002, 2004, and 2007) historical-institutional
approach to contemporary authoritarianism lays emphasis on the role of parties and coalition
management in authoritarian stability, once again refuting a widespread expectation that
elections destabilize authoritarian regimes. It is claimed that “the ruling organization and the
coalition it houses is the nerve center of authoritarianism”(2007:10). In regimes with limited
multiparty politics, there is a strong causal relationship between ruling parties and regime
persistence. Ruling parties are found to manage elite conflict, electoral control, and political
durability.
Generally, this conclusion has been reached based on the statistical analysis carried out
on 135 regimes in the period between 1975 and 2000, revealing that multiparty elections
posed no substantial impact on the survival of authoritarian regime. The case studies on Iran
and the Philippines revealed that once regime leaders had done away with party institutions,
conflict emerged triggering a viable opposition and a possibility of regime change (2004: 26).
Smith (2005) develops a theory of authoritarian origins and long-term durability based
on the cross-national tests of four single-party regimes in Africa and Asia. The idea is to show
the connection between initial conditions surrounding party consolidation and regime
longevity. Smith finds that the regimes of Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Tanzania reveal that it is not the existence of single party rule that explains the long-term
38
viability of some regimes and vulnerability of others, but rather their origins. More
specifically, the types of fiscal and political constraints parties face at their inception influence
the strength and shape of the institutions they create to maintain themselves. Smith argues
that the study of regime persistence and change can benefit much from an analytical focus on
the initial stages of formation of single-party regimes.
Apart from a strong ruling party, a stable authoritarian rule in no small measure rests
upon a strong state. As mentioned above, Levitsky and Way (2010) highlighted one specific
domestic dimension of competitive authoritarianism, namely the strength of state
organizations and governing-party. It has been found that if a ruling government has a firm
control and authority over its constituent parts, the country is much more likely to transition
to a stable authoritarian system. The ability of authoritarians to control civil society, prevent
elite defection, co-opt or repress opponents, defuse or crack down on protest, and win
elections rests to a large degree on the effectiveness of state coercive capacity. As Max Weber
recognized, state power ultimately rests on the ability to coerce.
In case of competitive authoritarians, according to Levisky and Way, low-intensity
coercion is extensively employed, which comes in the form of surveillance to monitor
opposition activity, low profile physical harassment of opposition activists, these include also
‘nonphysical forms such as denial of employment, scholarships, or university entrance to
opposition activists, use of tax, regulatory, or other state agencies to investigate and prosecute
opposition politicians, entrepreneurs, and media owners’(p.58) Such type of coercion, unlike
the so-called high-intensity coercion(e.g. violent repressions of mass demonstrations,
imprisonment, attempted assassination of major opposition leaders), are of preventive
nature, and in most cases make the use of the latter redundant. Case studies of Belarus,
Malaysia, Nicaragua, Russia, Taiwan, and Zimbabwe show examples of governments
establishing effective coercive apparatus, capable of managing and coordinating state
organizations responsible for internal security and domestic order.
MacKinnon’s (2011) analysis of ‘networked authoritarianism’ refers to an
authoritarian regime’s ability to adjust and take advantage of digital communications. In her
view, China represents a classic case of the networked authoritarian state where the everyday
life is under a firm control of the single ruling party, following, monitoring and manipulating
online activities of its citizens, who are ceaselessly seeking refuge in the online chatter to
speak out on the injustices and mistreatments of the government.
Following the recent uprisings in the Arab world, the Chinese authorities are already
taking great measures to further enhance its control over ‘virtual society’ that resulted from
39
the Internet, and to guide public opinion in the ‘healthy directions’, an edict from February 19
speech by Chinese President Hu Jintao. The plan is to increase spending on domestic security
– police, surveillance and the courts by 13.8 percent, which is to exceed the defense budget for
the first time.
7
Increasingly following the example of China, countries such as Russia and
several other former Soviet states have reverted to the technique of Internet filtering in highly
sophisticated and innovative ways. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam have brought
in Chinese Internet specialists to show them how to block websites from the West
(Kurlantzick 2010).
In fact, as Deibert and Rohozinski(2010) have argued, authoritarian governments, such
as China and Russia, utilize three ‘generations’ of Internet censorship techniques. The first of
these involves the use of Internet filtering and surveillance. The ‘second generation’
techniques are the creation of a legal environment in order to legitimize information control,
authorities’ informal requests to companies for removal of information, technical shutdowns
of websites, and computer-network attacks. The ‘third generation’ techniques include
warrantless surveillance, the setting up of ‘national cyber-zones’, state-sponsored information
campaigns, and direct physical measures to silence individuals or groups. The latter two
forms of technique, widely used around the world are in fact are more subtle and difficult to
detect. Thus, it is clear that new information technologies are tools not only in the hands of
human-right campaigners but are equally taken advantage of by authoritarian governments as
well.
Barma, Ratner and Spector’s (2008, 2009) research reveals that authoritarian regimes,
such as China, Russia and Venezuela, have embraced engagement in the international system
‘in specific ways that dually enable their success and shield them from pressures for domestic
political reform’. A set of modern authoritarian states, defined as ‘open authoritarian regimes’,
have established at the domestic level versions of state-controlled capitalism and retain a
sturdy grip on power. Barma, et al. argues that authoritarian regimes apply a strategy of the
so-called sociopolitical leapfrogging in order to keep the control over society. Such an
approach entails cherry-picking the most successful social, economic and domestic political
policies of democratic countries that are then applied at home in a step-by-step, closely
controlled fashion (2009: 8-9).
Buckley, C. ‘China internal security spending jumps past army budge’, Reuters, March 5, 2011:
http://www.globalnews.ca/world/China+internal+security+spending+jumps+past+army+budget/4387864/sto
ry.html
7
40
Slater (2010) ponders why have some of Southeast Asia’s authoritarian regimes, such
as Malaysia, proven so much more durable than others? He finds that one of the most
significant factors of authoritarian durability is the prevalence of what he terms a ‘protection
pact’: an elite coalition united in the view that authoritarian politics represents a necessary
bulwark against social chaos. If elites strongly associate authoritarianism with stability and
democracy with disorder, democratic transition becomes difficult if not entirely impossible’
(p.280). Apart from these attitudinal sources of durable authoritarianism, and even more
significantly, Slater, much like Brownlee, Geddes, Magaloni, Levitsky, and Way, points to
institutional sources – strong state and party institutions – as even more crucial in causing
authoritarian regime longevity, especially in case of Singapore.
Ezrow and Frantz (2011) point to the prevalence of a complex amalgamation of
structural, geo-political, and historical factors giving birth to and sustaining various types of
authoritarian regimes. They argue that military dictatorships largely present in Latin America
are sustained by the prevalence of internal factors such as good financial bases, large levels of
economic inequality, close alignment with upper and middle classes, dominance of weak
political parties, which ensured that military is not subservient to any one party.
By inversion, single-party regimes, largely found in region of Asia and Eastern Europe,
are sustained by domestic factors, which ensure that the military are subservient to the party,
there are lower levels of economic inequality and there was the need to have a strong party to
carry through economic program. Personalist regimes in Africa are said to have emerged and
prolonged because of factors such as ethnic diversity, weak militaries, weak political parties
and weak middle class (p. 49).
Some scholars emphasize factors such as political economy of oil in seeking to explain
authoritarian regime endurance. It suffices to recall Huntington’s (1991) argument that
broad-based economic development with industrialization contributes to democratization,
yet wealth from sale of natural resources, primarily oil, while benefiting state, does not
necessarily contribute to democratization. Smith (2004, 2006), among others8, develops a
two-path theory of oil-based authoritarian persistence, which reveals that there are two
major trajectories in the oil-exporting world, one leading to durable authoritarianism and the
other one producing vulnerable authoritarianism, oil-catalyzed authoritarian breakdown has
a tendency to generate new authoritarian regimes.
8
see also Diamond 2008; Youngs 2010; Ulfelder 2007
41
The theory is tested against data for 21 oil-exporting developing countries. In the first
outcome, authoritarian breakdown is prevented in already robust regimes, which took shape
in the earlier years as a response to fiscal and political challenges, by adding patronage rents.
The second outcome reveals the cases of regimes that are heavily shaped early on by oil
revenues. Both of these differing trajectories of oil politics, it is argued, tend to protract
authoritarianism in spite of economic crises. Thus the politics of oil serves as an important
factor of regime endurance. It must be recalled that none of developing countries that derive
more than 60 percent of their export earnings from oil and gas exports is a consolidated
democracy.
Overall, above we saw the examples of authoritarian manipulation of democratic
institutions, the role of the state. At the same time it suffices to question what role, if any, do
the ‘bottom up’, societal factors, such as the opposition and civil society play in seeking to
understand how authoritarian regimes last? Undoubtedly the strength of opposition forces is
an important determinant of authoritarian regime durability. Levisky and Way (2010) argue
that opposition strength is strongly related incumbent capacity; so that systematic coercion
by incumbents, those that have strong coercive and governing party structures, weakens
opposition movements, or even prevent their emergence in the first place, whereas in cases
when incumbents were unable to prevent large scale elite defection or use coercion,
‘protesters knocked down a rotten door’ (p.69).
Moreover, scholars such as Magaloni (2007), Ezrow and Frantz (2011), Rose, et.al.
(2011) note that some support of mass populace is still required in order for an authoritarian
regime to maintain power, regardless of whether the society genuinely support the ruling
regime, the most important goal is citizen mobilization in favor of the incumbent. Ezrow and
Frantz (2011:56) stress that presence of certain incentives stimulate the masses to support
the regime, these range from “financial like the distribution of government spoils, to security,
like the belief that life is more secure with the dictatorship in power given that violence would
likely erupt if the regime fell”.
Howard (2002) notes particular weakness of civil and opposition forces in postcommunist countries that are made apparent in the low levels of organizational membership
in comparison with other regions. He delineates a number of significant factors that help
explain the weakness of civil society in the region, namely the legacy of mistrust of communist
organizations, the widespread disappointment with political and economic developments
since the collapse of the state-socialist system. As a consequence, ‘the new democratic
institutions are neither rooted in, nor actively supported by, the larger population’ (p.165).
42
On the impact of popular uprisings in a regime change, it suffices to recall Huntington’s
(1991) argument that these are ‘seldom’ successful in bringing about democratization. For
Huntington, the elites reach agreement that ‘democracy is the least bad form of government
for their societies and for themselves’ (p.316).
Thus, as seen from above, by the early 2000s the scholarly focus has somewhat shifted
away from examining purely democratic transition to paying attention to the contemporary
non-democratic regimes, forming a separate field of study on authoritarian longevity distinct
from the research agenda of transitology. Moreover, the burgeoning literature on such types
of regimes has already started to accumulate a plethora of empirical explanations for the
internal dynamics of authoritarian regimes. Whereas most scholars embrace the domestic
perspective on authoritarian regime dynamics, some ponder whether the reasons and
mechanisms of a number of authoritarian regimes’ staying power may be external in nature as
well?
B. The external factors
Individual countries’ democratic practices have increasingly come under a heightened
global attention and scrutiny, especially following the rise of international election
observation by late 1980s that sets certain standards for electoral democracy. At the same
time, as Huntington (1991) notes, the changes in the foreign policies of the United States and
the European Union have brought to the fore external democracy promotion as a global
agenda. Authoritarian regimes were seeking to gain at least some international credibility as
democrats. Carothers (2000) stresses that early 1990s were characterized by a growing
international expectation of democratic behaviour, and that there was ‘the need for
democratic self-profiling on the international stage’.
Levistky and Way (2010) highlight in their research that the post-Cold War era, as the
time period chosen for their study, was when the international environment of the 1990s was
highly favorable to democracy, creating significant external constraints on autocrats, who
were faced with a militarily, economically, and ideologically strong Western powers. Thus, it
has been found that the level of linkage a country had with the West was one of the most
important factors in seeking to explain why some regimes after the end of the Cold War
became democratic and others reverted to competitive authoritarianism.
Based on the empirical evaluation of a large array of countries across the world, they
found that the higher the level of linkage (economic, diplomatic, political and civil) a country
43
had with the West in turn increases the likelihood of a country becoming a functioning
democracy. More precisely, a high level of linkage to the West means that fraud, corruption
and abuse will come to the attention of the international media and that domestic
constituency with personal and business ties to the West and opposition groups is being
strengthened.
Of the countries under study not a single government with a high level of linkage failed
to democratize. On the other hand, in cases when the linkage with the West was weak,
domestic factors weighed much heavier on the outcomes. And that is where the second factordomestic- comes into play, (described above in section A.), namely the organizational strength
of the incumbent government.
Thus what has been found is that the post-Cold War international environment created
a niche for competitive authoritarian regimes to emerge. In looking beyond the post-Cold War
era, by the late 2000s, as Levistky and Way predict, “the global balance of power had shifted
considerably…in this new context, external pressure for democracy may weaken in many
parts of the world. Greater availability of assistance from China and other states may expand
autocratic governments’ room for maneuver vis-à-vis Western powers…creating new
possibilities for authoritarian rule- competitive or not” (p-364). Clearly the optimism of the
post-Cold War years is not present in the non-democratic world of today.
Complementary to Levistky and Way’s analysis, Barma, et al. (2009) argue that the
international ‘openness’ of the modern authoritarian countries and the current global context
itself lead to the very sustainability of such regimes. Contrary to a conventional belief that
internal pressures and contradictions within such regimes would lead to their demise, Barma,
et al. argue that authoritarian regimes possess the ability to respond to those domestic forces
by the means of their international engagement. “The very innovations we commonly assume
as best-suited to promoting democracy are adeptly used by open authoritarian elites to
perpetuate their resilience” (2008: 8). Such a form of involvement on the international arena
is described to come in a form of ‘selective interconnectivity with the liberal international
order’, when these regimes possess leverages of material and ideological nature to prefer
their terms of such engagement. Authoritarian regimes of today are facing constraints as well
as opportunities by being a part of the globalized international system.
Material leverages encompass, among others, integration into the global financial and
capitalist system via dramatic sovereign wealth fund investments and more discreet
corporate mergers, successful trade and industrial policies, use of the Internet and complex
financial instruments. The ideological basis of modern authoritarian regimes takes on an
44
expansive definition of human rights, emphasizing political stability, human security, and
economic development as vital and necessary conditions for political freedoms. At the same
time,
these
regimes
promote
alternative
ideology
of
absolute
sovereignty
and
noninterference.
A report by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia,
“Undermining democracy: 21st century authoritarians”(2009), notes that “today's authoritarian
regimes are undermining democracy in updated, sophisticated, and lavishly funded ways.
This new class of autocrats poses the most serious challenge to the emergence of an
international system based on the rule of law, human rights, and open expression.” Russia,
China, Iran, Pakistan and Venezuela are the focus of the report as geopolitically significant
countries, which stand for a new brand of authoritarian regimes.
These regimes are said to apply new strategies and methods of control in and outside
their states in order to hinder democracy and rule of law. In particular, the report unravels
that the new authoritarians are using tight direct or indirect control over the most important
news media to reshape the public understanding of democracy, promoting their own
redefined version of the concept on the home front as well as expanding their media
broadcasting overseas. These regimes not only physically, economically and technologically
control the Internet, but also enlist pro-government commentators to subdue unwanted
discussions, guide and manage political discourse.
The report further stresses that the new authoritarian regimes differ from traditional
authoritarian regimes in that “today's authoritarians recognize that absolute control over
information and economic activity is neither possible nor necessary…The priority is political
control, and any societal actor that is prepared to acknowledge the supremacy of the ruling
group—and comply with its directives when called upon—is free to operate with a certain
amount of autonomy” (Freedom House, et. al., 2009)
Ambrosio (2009) posits that contemporary authoritarian regimes possess political
interest in undermining the spread of democracy and this in turn is reflected in the kind of
domestic and foreign policies they pursue. He puts forward five strategies of authoritarian
resistance that are meant to be policies aimed at countering the external democracy
promotion in order to guarantee regime endurance.
The strategies are to insulate, redefine, bolster, subvert, and coordinate. Authoritarians
aim to ensure that external forces that strengthen and sustain regime opposition must be
barred. Thus the strategy of insulation is applied that entails shielding a country from external
democratic pressures, cross-border influences and processes; this involves taking measures
45
such as blocking access to the international media, pursuing an autarkic economic policy, or
restricting foreign travel of nationals.
At the same time, the incumbents seek to create legitimacy for the regime by
rhetorically claiming that any political system follows its own path based on its history and
political culture. The strategy of redefining entails discrediting external and domestic
criticism, for example by misrepresenting the nature of a political system by defining it as
being democracy with its own adjective, such as ‘Islamic democracy’, ‘developmentalist
democracy’, ‘managed democracy’. Another way in which authoritarians seek to silence its
critics is to present culturalist arguments of inapplicability of ‘Western values’ to one’s
cultural and historical background and to portray external criticism as “an attempt to ‘impose’
a form of government on a sovereign state and therefore akin to ‘imperialism”(p.22). Also in
the light of the criticism, authoritarian regimes have been on the offensive in turn criticizing
and questioning other countries’ commitments to liberal democracy.
Bolstering involves providing support for fellow like-minded authoritarian rulers,
whereas subverting entails sabotaging democratic states by the means of economic,
diplomatic, political, and military pressures. Coordinating means working with other
countries to resist democratization (The last three of the strategies are to be considered in
Chapter 3).
Thus as we have seen, Levistky and Way’s, Barma, et al., Freedom House and
Ambrosio’s analyses radically critique and undermine the conventional transition-theory
based assumptions, particularly the notion that international dynamics play little role
whereas domestic structures and actors are paramount. The table below presents a simplified
way to see internal and external factors of authoritarian regimes endurance based on the
findings of the above presented literature. The very interplay of these factors brings about
authoritarian regime stability.
CONTEMPORARY AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES: SOURCES OF DURABIILITY
General findings:
INTERNAL
EXTERNAL
Coexistence of democratic rules and The prevailing global context
autocratic methods (Levistky and Way
2002)
46
Tools of substantive control and Level of linkage a country has with the
manipulation of the representative West (Levisky and Way 2010)
institutions (Schedler 2006)
Policy concessions and distribution of
rents; cooperation mobilized through
political institutions, i.e. legislature,
parties and elections (Gandhi and
Przeworski 2007)
A considerable shift in the global balance
of power, which may weaken external
pressure for democracy (Levisky and Way
2010)
Establishment of credible power-sharing International ‘openness’ of authoritarian
arrangements with the elite (Magaloni regimes; ‘selective interconnectivity with
2008)
the liberal international order’ (Barma,
et.al. 2009)
Ruling parties manage elite conflict, Undermined international
electoral control and political durability promotion campaign
(Brownlee 2007)
democracy
Creating legitimacy for the regime;
discrediting external and domestic
Effectiveness of state coercive capacity criticism (Freedom House, et.al. 2009)
(Levistky and Way 2010)
Taking
advantage
of
digital Barring external forces that strengthen
communications (MacKinnon 2011)
and sustain regime opposition (Ambrosio
2009)
Applying the strategy of ‘sociopolitical
leapfrogging’ (Barma, et. al.2009)
Prevalence of a ‘protection pack’ (Slater
2010)
Political economy of oil (Smith 2004)
Opposition strength is strongly related
incumbent capacity (Levisky and Way
2010)
47
The scholarship presented in this chapter is an emerging empirical research on the
new forms of authoritarianism, quite distinct from the workings of conventional typologies of
authoritarian rule, those found in the seminal works of Huntington (1970) and Linz (1975).
The authoritarian forms presented by recent scholarship are conceptualized more or less as
an intermediate category of regimes in between two general notions of electoral democracies
on the one hand and closed authoritarian regimes on the other. The analyses offer an array of
explanations for why autocratic regimes manage to hold onto power. Scholars question why
some autocrats retain their grip on power in the wake of the third wave of democratization.
The analysis has sought to contribute to the existing body of in-depth comparative studies
on authoritarian rule, not of a classic type, but of the somewhat altered kind that habituates
fairly successfully in the democratization era of today. As we have seen from above, the
domestic-level analysis of authoritarian stability largely focuses on the degree of strength of
incumbent governments to thwart opposition challenges by utilizing specific instruments of
control and manipulation of democratic institutions. Whereas, the international-level analysis
of authoritarian endurance highlights the essential changing nature of the global context and
the role that the West plays in either strengthening or weakening authoritarian rule.
While the basic level of analysis of authoritarian endurance remains largely domestic,
external factors are increasingly gaining prominence. It is argued that much more scholarly
attention should be directed to examination of international factors that are increasingly
playing a far greater role in prolonging authoritarian rule. The notions such as “diffusion”,
“contagion”, “gravity”, “demonstration effect”, “complex interdependence”, “convergence”,
“emulation”, “socialization”, “learning”, “external anchoring” have been applied extensively in
democratization literature to account specifically for possible mechanisms and patterns by
which international factors may influence political outcomes in direction of greater
democratization (see for example Huntington 1991; Linz and Stepan 1996; Whitehead 2001;
Kubicek 2003; Brinks and Coppedge 2006; Simmons et al. 2006; Morlino 2012, Chapter 6).
Could the same notions perhaps be applied to account for political outcomes of a different
trajectory, namely authoritarianization of a regime? The idea is to entertain the proposition
that the very forces that are meant to foster globalization, capitalism and increasing
international and transnational interdependence and pressures are equally contributing to
endurance of authoritarian rule.
According to Jackson (2010:103) “there is little written that explores the role of
external factors and whether and how they influence regimes to maintain status quo, or
‘upgrade’, or strengthen authoritarian elements of their political systems”. In the words of
48
Ambrosio, the Middle East uprisings have shown that “not only do we have democratic-based
demonstration effects and learning (i.e., one pro-democracy or anti-regime group being
inspired by and learning from those that came before it), but we also have authoritarian-based
demonstration effects and learning. The first thing that Egyptian authorities did, as a result of
seeing what occurred in Iran and Tunisia, was shut down the internet.” 9
Indeed, unlike the domestic-level analysis, the international dimension is still an
underdeveloped field of study, not only in the realm of how international processes impact on
the domestic setting but also how being an authoritarian impacts on a regime’s foreign policy
behavior and international system in general. Based on the findings outlined in this Chapter,
the next Chapter will continue to ponder the phenomenon of authoritarianism and take the
discussion to the international level in order to examine how authoritarian regimes in turn
impact, if at all, on the international politics.
Author’s email exchange with Thomas Ambrosio (one of the leading contemporary scholars on authoritarianism;
his analysis is covered extensively in Chapter 2 and 3) following the Arab revolts, February 28, 2011
9
49
Chapter 3: Regime type and international behavior: focus on authoritarian states
In the previous chapter, we have outlined a framework of the study on non-democratic
form of rule, examining closely the internal and external sources of authoritarian regime
survival.
By inverting the questions posed earlier about the internal and external
mechanisms of survival of authoritarianism, in this chapter it suffices to question how being
an authoritarian impacts, if at all, on a regime’s foreign policy behavior and international
system in general? Answering this question ultimately involves a reference in Part I to
Democratic Peace Paradigm and ways in which it might help to shed some light on
authoritarian regimes’ international behavior examined in Part II of this chapter.
Traditionally, few international relations (IR) scholars have given much credence to
the role of regime type as a variable in the study of international relations. Realism and
especially neorealism, as leading IR paradigms, have paid somewhat scant attention to state
characteristics, attributing much of causal importance in explaining states’ behavior to the
distribution of power in the international system. It is only with the emergence of the
Democratic peace paradigm within the liberal IR theory that a number of significant findings,
which suggest that a regime type has an impact on international behavior, have been thrown
into the light. As a result scholars began paying increasing attention to the relationship among
state structure, leaders' incentives, foreign policy behavior, and international outcomes.
Does the nature of a domestic political system help to determine the direction of a
regime’s foreign policy? In general, there is no doubt that domestic factors have an influence
on the nature of foreign policy; in the words of Wendt (1999:2) “foreign policy behavior is
often determined primarily by domestic politics”. The difficulty lies perhaps in determining
precisely the kind of linkages that bind these two theaters of policy making.
This part of the chapter begins with a review of the democratic peace debate’s
theoretical and largely empirical findings, which suggest that regime type indeed influences
international behavior. Thereafter, the analysis moves on to generally focus on authoritarian
states’ international behavior through the prism of the democratic peace paradigm.
PART I. Democratic Peace Paradigm
Is there a relationship between domestic regime type and a state’s propensity to go to
war? The democratic peace theory, as a liberal approach to international security in the postCold War world, has contributed enormously to the international relations field, foremost in
50
bringing to the front the idea that domestic politics, beliefs and norms can serve as crucial
determinants of state international behavior.
This part of the chapter reviews the literature concerning the major tenants of
democratic peace proposition, its classical as well as current versions. There are three
variants
of
the
democratic
peace
proposition—the
institutional,
normative,
and
interdependence strands. The primary claim of democratic peace proponents is that
democratic states do not wage war against each other, although a number of scholars have
modified the claim to the proposition that “democracies are less likely to fight wars with each
other.” Overall, the validity of the idea that democracies are more pacific continues to attract a
great deal of scholarly interest and there is a continuous debate at large on this issue. There
are a number of alternative explanations and claims of the thesis and it still remains to be
seen which has proven to be the most convincing.
Development of the democratic peace thesis within the Liberal Internationalist thought
In the post-Cold War world, a particular strand of ‘Liberal’ approach to international
security has come to the fore, receiving a wide support in the Western academic as well as
political circles. The overarching argument of this approach constitutes a claim that
democratic states tend not to fight other democratic states. The underlying basic rationale for
this argument is the idea that democracy represents a fundamental source of peace.
The democratic peace thesis takes its origin in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay, Perpetual
Peace. Kant was one of the leading Liberals of the Enlightenment, who had strongly believed
that reason could bring freedom and justice in world politics and laid emphases on domestic
sources of international peace. For Kant, achieving perpetual peace necessitated the
transformation of individual consciousness, republican constitutionalism, and a federal
contract between states to bring about the abolition of war, rather than its regulation.
In Perpetual Peace, Kant developed three Definitive Articles for a permanent peace,
namely a) The civil constitution of every state shall be republican, b) The law of nations shall
be founded a Federation of free states, c) The rights of men, as citizens of the world, shall be
limited to the conditions of universal hospitality. (Kant 1903:117) The second and third
articles relate more broadly to a transnational order. On an important front, Kant had argued
that the frequency of conflicts would be drastically reduced if the people, rather than the
prince, were to decide whether or not the force must be used.
In the 1980s, Kant’s ideas on a ‘pacific federation’ have been revived and reworked
foremost by Michael Doyle. In a widely quoted article ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, Doyle
51
forcefully argues that liberal states have created a ‘separate peace’. He thoroughly pondered a
number of theoretical traditions of liberalism and contended that the Kantian legacy to the
modern liberalism has been that liberal states exercise peaceful restrain in relation with each
other, having “established a separate peace – but only among themselves.”(Doyle 1986: 1156)
Doyle reformulated the three ‘definitive articles ‘of Kant’s theory of democratic peace
into the contemporary forms of democratic representation, an ideological commitment to
human rights, and transnational interdependence. He argues that these three elements help
explain why democratic states are ‘peace-prone’. Whereas non-democratic states tend to be
‘war-prone’ for the fact that such attributes are absent. (Doyle 1995: 180-4) Furthermore,
Doyle noted that in their relations with authoritarian regimes and stateless peoples, liberal
democracies are as aggressive as any other type of state.
Yale political scientist, Bruce Russet, has made an extensive contribution to the
democratic peace thesis, further solidifying the theory’s credibility. In 1993 “Grasping the
Democratic Peace”, Russet unravels and clarifies the theoretical debate backed up with a
thorough empirical investigation that underpins the relative pacifism of democracies. In
search of evidence to the idea of democratic peace, Russet goes back in time to the world of
ancient Greece as well as non-Western nonindustrial societies. He points to the pervasiveness
of normative restraints on conflict between democracies, as well as structural/institutional
constraints on democracies’ decisions to go to war as the two main explanatory variables for
the phenomenon of democratic peace.
Noteworthy is Russet’s emphasis on the fact that normative restraint as an explanatory
model is the more powerful one; this conclusion is the result of measurements of norms by
the absence of violence in domestic politics and the duration of democratic regimes, which
Russet found to be somewhat more strongly associated with peace between democracies than
was measure of structural/institutional constraints. According to Russet, “it is an empirical
fact that democracies rarely fight each other. They do not need to fight each other because
they can employ alternative methods of conflict resolution, and at less cost than through
violent conflict.”(Russet, 1993: 136)
Russet further argues that democratic values are not the only influence permitting
states to avoid war; all states are concerned with power and strategic influences and
democracies are no exception. Shared democratic values will contribute to a more peaceful
world, but not by themselves eliminate all wars. Russet famously stressed ‘vulgar realism’s
vision of war of all against all, in which the threat that other states pose is unaffected by their
internal norms and institutions’. (Russett 1995: 175)
52
Thus, Doyle and Russet along with other scholars (Benoit 1996; Ray 1995; Rummel
1995; Rousseau et al. 1996, Bremer 1992; Gowa 1999; Maoz 1997) have elevated the
democratic peace idea to an almost undisputable, law-like proposition, at the same time
instigating a relentless debate about the validity of theory and its application in foreign
policies of Western liberal-democratic states, particularly the United States, in the post-Cold
War era.
The scholarly debates on validity of the paradigm
Generally, theorists tend to disagree about the theory’s causal claims. The scholarly
search for an explanation to why liberal democratic states are more peaceful continues.
Moreover, there is at large a parallel scholarly debate about which definitions and
interpretations of democracy and peace, as the theory’s most basic concepts, to utilize in the
light of the fact that there is generally a lack of universal standard for assessing these
concepts. Thus the ongoing debate is largely conceptual and semantic in nature with little
consensus yet established. Some critics have claimed that, “it is only intellectual suppleness –
the continual tinkering with definitions and categories – that allows democratic peace
theorists to deny that democratic states have fought each other”. (Layne 1994: 40) Others
contend that liberal proponents of the democratic peace “ignore their own arguments, and
selectively adopt definitions of key variables so that data analysis yields the results they seek”.
(Spiro, 1994: 55)
Danilovic and Clare’s (2007) recent theoretical and empirical re-investigation of the
Kant’s reasoning behind the liberal peace deserves a particular attention. Their basic claim is
that the established democratic peace research has predominately focused on the
representative nature of electoral democratic institutions and has left out to a significant
degree even more crucial elements of Kantian republicanism, namely the respect for civil
liberties and the rule of law, as a source of international peace. They draw a clear distinction
between democracy and liberalism in theoretical terms and provide empirical analysis to
validate such claim.
Undoubtedly, the debate over the concepts is highly significant and in itself constitutes
a source of further thorough scholarly inquiry. Taking the phrase ‘democratic peace’ itself,
one cannot help but note that it seems to indicate a direct link between peace and democracy,
that to achieve peace, one has to look solely for something in democracies. Perhaps a clearer
expectation would be to acknowledge that peace is linked to those norms and institutions that
are widely associated with democracies.
53
Overall, however, none of the criticisms of the paradigm voiced by opponents has been
able to undermine the overarching argument of the democratic peace theory. Instead what have
emerged were distinct largely empirical studies seeking to further refine the theory’s
boundary conditions. The leading ones include the findings that reveal that democracies tend
to win a disproportionate share of the wars they fight (Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 1998);
democracies are more likely to initiate wars against autocracies than are autocracies against
democracies (Bennett and Stam 1998); and larger democracies seem more constrained to
avoid war than are smaller democracies (Morgan and Campbell 1991)
At the same time various models in the general democratic peace scholarship have
emerged, each laying emphasis on different factors to account for the plausible causal
mechanisms at play. A number of scholars have considered the plausibility of reverse
causality, i.e. suggestions that peace may induce or facilitate democracy, causing a spurious
correlation between democracy and peace. (Thompson 1996; James, Solberg and Wolfson
1999; Rasler and Thompson 2004)
In a study undertaken by Mansfield and Snyder (1995, 2007) a clear distinction is
emphasized between ‘mature’ and new or ‘transitional’ democracies, with former being in
capacity to maintain a separate peace, while the latter likely to be even more belligerent.
Other scholarly studies have been preoccupied with linking peace with factors other than
regime type such as nuclear deterrence, the balance of power and especially trading ties.
Economic development is viewed to be a strong variable in seeking the causal
relationship between democracy and peace. Gartzke (2007, 2010) calls on to view both
democracy and peace not as independent variables, each causing the other, but rather as a
product of common underlying forces, such as political transformation and especially
economic development. He argues that overtime commerce rather than conquest has become
a more preferential choice for developed countries. “Peace and democracy have come to an
increasing portion of the globe not because humanity had been improved or institutions
perfected but because economics has made most forms of state-based predation inefficient.”
(2010:75)
Clearly, one should not underestimate the forces of globalization and economic
interdependence that draws together democracies and autocracies alike. What must be
acknowledged is the nature of global economy today: the sources of economic productivity
depend on institutions, property rights, and political stability, on a complex interconnected
global economy. Other researchers point to societal factors such as civil-military structures
and political communications as strong reinforcing elements of the link between democracy
54
and peace (Choi and James 2008).
Recent rationalist models in the democratic peace literature overrule the possibility that
norms are a primary causal driving force behind the democratic peace, as has been argued
forcefully by Russet, claiming that the norms argument is not fully supported empirically and
that institutional and/or material factors are highly significant causal elements (Fearon, 1994;
Bueno de Mesquita, et al, 1999, 2003; Schultz, 2001; Reiter and Stam, 2002). In particular,
some findings reveal that domestic political institutions influence the choice between war and
negotiation. By laying out a game theoretic model in which the perfect Bayesian equilibrium is
found, scholars have demonstrated that democratic leaders in trying to avoid risking their
political tenure in office are not so inclined to engage in a war unless they are confident of
winning. Institutional explanatory model is claimed to be more comprehensive, accounting for
all existing regularities that together taken to define the democratic peace.
Derived evidence shows that democracies devote more resources to their war efforts
than do non-democracies. Hence, “since two democrats in a dispute both try hard, both can
anticipate that, if they go to war, each will spend lots of resources in a risky situation where
they are not disproportionately advantaged by their great effort. This is shown to incline
democrats generally to negotiate with one another rather than fight”. Thus the incentives of
leaders in war differ as a function of their institutional arrangements (Bueno de Mesquita, et
al, 1999). Works by Gaubatz (1996), Smith (1996), Leeds (1999), Mansfield et al (2002)
contend that democracies are more likely to comply with international agreements than
authoritarian states. It has been argued that this has to do with the influence of democratic
elections that make it costly for electorally minded leaders to breach international
agreements.
Alternatively, a new wave of inquiry into the evolutionary expansion of the democratic
peace has taken off – systemic analysis, looking at how changes in the proportion of
democracy and the amounts of conflict in the global system are related. This has resulted in a
number of empirical studies finding a positive relationship between global democracy and
systemic peace (Crescenzi and Enterline 1999; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997; Maoz and Abdolali
1989).
Thus a tendency has developed to move beyond examining the dyadic democratic peace
to systemic-level behavior. Particularly noteworthy is the dynamic model of the democratic
community strength developed by Kadera, Crescenzi, and Shannon (2003). Such a model
captures interplay of both normative and material/institutional factors that in tandem serve
as strong causal forces behind the democratic peace. It is contended that the strength of the
55
democratic community is a function of how many democracies exist in the system relative to
autocracies, the intensity of states’ commitment to democracy, and states’ material power.
These variables are used and their aggregate measures established with the aim of examining
the theoretical consequences of changes in the strength of the democratic community.
In theoretical and empirical terms, the authors of the model sought to demonstrate,
among other phenomena, that when the democratic community is strong, new democracies
are more likely to survive. The interesting element of the study is the authors’ stress that their
research brings to light a different view on democracy promotion as a policy goal of advanced
western democracies that must be viewed as beneficial in the long term. Liberal governments
are advised to combine the promotion of democracy with pragmatic goals of national
economic and military strength. “The global democratic community plays a role in the
survival of democracy, and in the long run it is this survival that is key to achieving a global
democratic peace”. (Kadera, Crescenzi, and Shannon 2003: 235)
The democratic peace paradigm’s basic classical premises continue to entice further
scholarly research, most of which tends to focus on the contradictions and paradoxes of the
theory. Scholars increasingly cannot avoid viewing the theory directly or indirectly through
the prism of contemporary wars and military interventions fought in the name of human
rights and democratization. Ergo, the theory must inevitably account for democratic war as
well, i.e. examining the ‘resort to the use of force’ on the part of democracies must become an
intrinsic part of the field of study (for more on ‘democratic war’ theorizing see Geis, Brock and
Muller, 2006).
However, the truth is that the various approaches accounting for the democratic peace
theory are ill-equipped to face the task of explaining democratic war involvement. This
promises to be a challenging endeavor for democracy theorists because the whole idea behind
the democratic peace paradigm was to denigrate the core realism’s assumptions about war as
an essential part of an anarchic international system by seeking to elevate peace, cooperation,
regime building as the essential features of the world order envisioned by liberal
international thought.
Also challenging would be an attempt to construct a coherent overarching theory on
democratic peace out of the established approaches and dispersed hypothesis-testing
quantitative studies, accumulated over the course of the last 15 years. In the end, there is yet
much to be done to theory building on democratic peace, at the same time the paradigm itself
has a high potential to greatly contribute to our understanding of the democracy-autocracy
dichotomy.
56
PART II. International behavior of authoritarian states as distinct?
What does the democratic peace paradigm reveal about the behavior of authoritarian
regimes on the world stage? How is being an authoritarian regime impact, if at all, on its
international behavior and international system as a whole? As seen from Part I the democratic
peace hypothesis is focused almost entirely on the conflict proneness of democratic states.
There are however a few corollaries that can be made for the study on authoritarian regimes’
international behavior. Russett and Oneal (2001) put it simply by arguing that since
authoritarian states are on the whole less constrained internally than democracies, they are
more likely to engage in conflict.
Yet, some scholars remain unconvinced by conflict proneness of authoritarian states.
Hill (2003:239) argues that “non-democracies do not necessarily engage in aggressive or
uncooperative behavior internationally, however unpleasant they may be towards their own
people…There is no convincing evidence which suggests that autocracies pursue their ends
internationally through aggression, terrorism or general uncooperativeness”.
A string of recent scholarship has focused on the so-called ‘autocratic peace’ that might
resemble a ‘democratic peace’, in order to entertain a proposition that internal institutional
checks on executive authority serve to moderate the actions of states and apply this to
authoritarian regimes. They have used the insights about democracy and war generated by
the democratic peace research in order to understand the conflict behavior of authoritarian
regimes. Peceny et al. (2002) stress the need to differentiate between various types of
authoritarian regimes in examining their conflict behavior, specifically between three –
personalist, military and single-party dictatorships. It was found that specific types of
authoritarian regimes are peaceful toward one another.
In particular, no two personalist dictators or two military regimes have gone to war
with each other in the post-World War II era. On the other hand, single-party regimes have
fought wars with one another during the same period under study three times. This finding
was based on the analysis of four causal mechanisms that bring together regime type and war,
namely institutional constraints, transparency, war fighting capabilities, and shared values.
Therefore this line of research cogently argues for widening the scope of the research that
deals with the impact of regime type on conflict behavior in order to bring the level of the
impact of authoritarianism on foreign policy to the level of the study of the impact of
democracy. Overall, the empirical analysis has found that there may be a separate peace
among authoritarian regimes, yet not as robust as the one found among democracies.
Ishiyama, et.al. (2008) examine the conflict behavior of authoritarian states using
57
monadic analysis, i.e. whether states engage in conflict first, found in the democratic peace
paradigm. The idea was to empirically test a proposition of whether a ‘monadic authoritarian
peace’ exists? The methodology applied involved 101 states from 1980-2002 assessing the
effect of authoritarian institutions on the likelihood of a state being the first to use violent
force in a militarized dispute.
As a result of the tests, it was found that generally different types of authoritarian
regimes do indeed impact on the conflict propensity of authoritarian states. These results
contribute to the prevailing assumptions that authoritarian regimes with more institutional
checks on executive authority are less likely to first use military force than are regimes that
have fewer such institutional checks.
A more recent study by Weeks (2011) reviews the existing literature on the conflict
initiation behavior of autocracies and ponders whether all authoritarian regimes are equally
belligerent and in particular, ‘what specific political institutions in dictatorships encourage
leaders to initiate military disputes abroad, and why?’ Weeks finds that there are in fact
considerable differentiations in the predisposition of authoritarian regimes to initiate
international conflicts depending on their differing types. This is accounted for by a number of
factors, one of which concerns domestic audience and as Weeks argues against the grain of
the conventional wisdom, ‘many authoritarian leaders face powerful domestic audiences
composed of regime elites’, as in case for example of modern China, and Argentina and Brazil
under their military juntas and must thus be aware of their preferences and interests in
matters of war and peace. Weeks also differentiates between audiences’ background
experiences and socialization as in whether or not they are military or civilian-led regimes,
with the former favoring the initiation of international conflict more frequently than their
civilian counterparts.
A further critical factor to acknowledge is that in personalist regimes, such as North
Korea or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the leaders are unconstrained, i.e. do not face powerful
domestic audiences, and therefore stand as the types of authoritarian regimes that are the
most belligerent and a decision to go to war ultimately depends on the preferences and
tendencies of these leaders themselves. Overall, Weeks’ original theoretical framework
greatly contributes to the study of comparative authoritarianism and conflict initiation in
autocracies by highlighting significant differences prevalent between non-personalist
authoritarian leaders and personalist dictatorships.
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Beyond examination of conflict behavior of autocracies
Increasingly scholars have begun to embed the democratic peace research in a broader
understanding of the influence of domestic political institutions on international interactions
and at the same time, examine a corollary of the democratic peace paradigm in relation to
authoritarian regimes. A strong and consistent relationship between a regime type and
foreign policy behavior in both monadic and dyadic dimensions has been particularly noted
by Leeds and Davis (1999). They go well beyond the democratic peace paradigm’s main
empirical finding that democracies do not fight each other and show that internal institutional
structure of states impacts on the international decisions of their leaders well beyond military
actions in a much broader and systematic way.
By means of an empirical testing of states’ international behavior in the period
between 1953 and 1978, their findings reveal that (a) states with more democratic
characteristics tend to behave more cooperatively in the international system, (b)
democracies tend to engage in high levels of cooperation and low levels of conflict with other
democracies, (c) non-democracies exhibit less cooperative behavior in relation to
democracies. Theirs is an attempt to widen the scope and breadth of the democratic peace
theory and give much credence to the notion that the influence of regime type should be taken
more seriously in the study of international relations.
It may appear as simple logic at first that democracies constrain their decision-makers
and, conversely, that decision-makers in non-democratic states have fewer constraints on
their actions. Increasingly scholars have begun paying more attention to authoritarian states’
behavior internationally in relation to their internal dynamics.
Kinne’s (2005) study applies poliheuristic theory of decision-making in autocracies.
Based on the combination of rational choice and cognitive psychology literatures, he uses the
poliheuristic theory in order to assess the nature of foreign policy decision-making in various
types of authoritarian regimes. According to the poliheuristic theory largely developed by
Mintz and Geva (1997) and Mintz (1993, 2004), in order for leaders to reach a difficult
decision, they must filter through vast amounts of information available and they do so using
shortcuts, or heuristics.
The most effective such shortcut was found to be the ‘non-
compensatory’ decision rule, by which leaders tend to select those options that are likely to
lead to positive outcomes on a single dimension of concerns and in foreign policy field, the
political dimension is always the non-compensatory one. Kinne’s findings reveal that “leaders
measure their success in political units, such as public approval ratings, and they are only able
to turn their attention to other dimensions – e.g. economic or diplomatic concerns- after their
59
political concerns have been satisfied”. He further argues that leaders in dictatorships will
make foreign policy choices to deter those individuals who can oust them from doing so,
minimizing the likelihood of a negative outcome. (2005:115).
The role of regime type in influencing foreign policy change has been noted by Corrales
(2009) in his study of Venezuela’s foreign policy under Chavez. He argues that regime type is
a significant variable that has an impact on Venezuela’s foreign policy aims and capabilities.
Following the emergence of Chavez’s authoritarian regime and particularly in the period
2004-2008, foreign policy has been directed, for one, towards strengthening ties with nondemocracies, which represents a stark departure from past foreign policy aims of the
Venezuelan state. In the past, the country has been known for a foreign policy tradition of
promoting democracy and institution building. Furthermore, Corrales stresses that Chavez
has ‘monopolized’ foreign policy decision making by excluding parties, certain business
groups and technical experts from participation in policy formation and ‘embedding’ key
institutions, such as the ministry of foreign affairs, the Central Bank, the military, with likeminded ideologues.
China, Russia, Iran, Syria and Cuba are Venezuela’s strategic partners. Corrales argues
that ties with closed regimes is a foreign policy move expected of any autocracy because
establishing political and business ties with similar regimes makes it easier to keep secrets than
would be the case in relations with democracies, whose governments by definition are subject to
domestic scrutiny. For example, Venezuela’s strategic partnership with Russia partly based on
a common antipathy towards the US unipolarity and largely build on commercial interests
(e.g. the Russian arms sale to Venezuela) (Katz 2006), had sprang up with a relative ease and
in a short time span, following a number of personal meetings between Chavez and Putin.
A close examination of China’s policies towards other authoritarian regimes is an even
better instance, exemplifying the notion that dealing with authoritarian regimes may be
relatively straightforward and unproblematic. China had established long-standing friendship
with authoritarian states such as North Korea, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe and Sudan based on
vast investment and trading deals.
The respect for state sovereignty and noninterference has always been at the heart of
China’s foreign relations while it seeks to partner with countries that present the potential for
profitability. Kurlatzick (2005), Barma and Ratner (2006), McGiffert (2009) and Breslin
(2009) among others speak of China’s rising soft power evident in its success in promoting an
idea of the world where nations do not interfere in one another’s affairs, while its
authoritarian state-led economic development has become an appealing form of domestic
60
governance in the developing world. Scholars speak of a “China model” as a potential
alternative to the democratic-capitalist model of development that couples rapid economic
growth with social order and political control.
At the same time, China has been the leading source of unconditional foreign assistance
to the regions of Latin America and Africa, where such arrangements were viewed as
beneficiary and largely welcomed. At the same time, according to Freedom House (2009) such
type of aid fosters unaccountable and corrupt models of governance across the developing
world. Based as it is on the principles of noninterference, the type of foreign aid from China is
being implicitly juxtaposed with the Western aid conditionality.
There is an emerging literature, which argues that authoritarian and semiauthoritarian regimes are ascending at the international stage and at the same time their
growing international influence is a reality. Gat (2007) argues that today’s global liberal
democratic order is faced with the challenge that stems from the rise of authoritarian
capitalist great powers, exemplified by China and Russia that ‘may represent a viable
alternative path to modernity’ for ‘there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that a
transition to democracy by today’s authoritarian capitalist powers is inevitable’.
Kuchins (2006) in ‘Will the Authoritarians of the World Unite?’ points out that a
deepening Chinese-Russian entente is an evident part of ‘a growing global ideological conflict
between consolidating democracies and dictatorships’. Beijing and Moscow are said to be
leading an authoritarian backlash that emerged as a result of the expanding US democracy
promotion campaign and rhetoric, viewed by autocrats instead as an expansion of
Washington’s geopolitical interests, and following the 2003-2005 ‘color revolutions’ in
Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
Among a recent string of research on the relationship between domestic regime and
foreign policy behavior, Kagan’s (see Chapter I) is the most far-reaching, for he defines a
regime type as a defining feature of international politics. In his view, the existing state of
global politics has entered an era in which the global competition between democratic and
autocratic governments will become a dominant feature of the 21st century world. For Kagan,
the fact that countries like Russia and China are autocracies has great implications for the
international system, and makes ideological struggles between great powers all the more
probable in time to come. “True realism about international affairs means understanding that
a nation’s foreign policy is heavily shaped by the nature of its government” (Kagan, 2008: 98)
Being significantly influenced by these three scholars, Ambrosio (2009) undertakes an
in-depth study on authoritarianism’s resurgence and contends that the democratic world is
61
faced with a new world order in which autocratic regimes, such as Russia and China, are
increasingly playing a bigger role and even serve as potential models and allies for countries
under democratic pressures. Ambrosio takes further Diamond’s argument on an apparent
‘backlash’ against democracy promotion on the part of authoritarian states (presented in
Chapter 1), to contend that the recent ‘authoritarian backlash’ has a strong international
dimension and consequences.
He argues that authoritarian regimes are actively resisting or countering the spread of
democracy and this has become their domestic and foreign policy objective. Ambrosio argues
that democratization literature, while increasingly paying significant attention to the
international-level component to democratization process, tends to focus overly on
“explaining democratic successes, rather than democratic failures, and democracy promotion,
rather than autocratic opposition” (p.6). In other words, the democratization literature is
inadequate in elucidating how authoritarians react to international democratic trends. His is
an attempt to demonstrate that autocratic states are not passive actors of democratic trends.
Quite on the contrary, he argues cogently that there is a need to move beyond this traditional
perspective and examine how authoritarian regimes are actively (emphases added)
confronting democratization at the international level.
In countering democratic norms, authoritarian regimes are said to be utilizing five
strategies of authoritarian resistance – insulate, redefine, bolster, subvert, and coordinate. In
the domestic sphere, the strategies of insulation and redefinition are used (outlined more
thoroughly in Chapter 2). In the realm of foreign policy, authoritarian countries are said to
employ the strategy of bolstering, i.e. supporting like-minded fellow authoritarians because an
authoritarian regimes’ survival in no small measures rests on the kind of political systems
that dominate their neighboring countries. Thus, the support comes in a form of patronage, a
mixture of economic, diplomatic, military and political aid. The examples of this according to
Ambrosio are China’s support for the military dictatorship in Myanmar, Venezuela’s aiding of
regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador and Russia’s policy towards Belarus. In addition to bolstering
fellow autocrats, an authoritarian state can also utilize the strategy of subverting
democratically elected governments in case when a democratic reversal is likely. In this case,
a mixture of economic, political and military pressures is applied, as was the case in Russia’s
policy toward Georgia and Ukraine following the color revolutions.
In outlining the strategy of coordinating Ambrosio refers to the work by Peceny et.al
2002 on ‘autocratic peace’, mentioned earlier in this chapter. A common interest in preserving
their regimes, prompts autocrats to cooperate more closely among themselves. A primary
62
example of the way in which authoritarian states can unite is by creating international
organizations in order to shield themselves from the possibility of a regime change. “Such
organizations will seek to establish a regional order which makes it illegitimate to criticize
these governments, interfere in the domestic politics of its member states, or promote regime
change” (p.24). Organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are clear examples of groupings of authoritarian
countries seeking to undermine democratic trends in their regions. Clearly as a result of such
efforts being undertaken by authoritarian regimes, the international environment can become
increasingly favorable to the persistence of authoritarianism.
Ambrosio’s work is a valuable contribution to the general theory that seeks to examine
the relationship between the international level, democratization, and authoritarianism,
primarily for his emphasis on the need to expand the theorizing on external democracy
promotion in order to acknowledge that ‘the politics of democratization are inherently
interactive, as a contest between opposing forces and actors at the international level as well’
(p.202). Furthermore, Ambrosio’s claim throughout his analysis that authoritarian states are
committed to challenge the norms of democracy promotion, led by Russia and China, as two
‘critical’ players is widely shared by a number of scholars. McFaul (2010) argues that
authoritarian regimes of Russia, Iran and Venezuela are building up resources to allocate for
exporting their forms of government; they “did not simply defend their own autocratic
systems, but provided ideas and resources to other anti-democratic governments and social
movements” (p.6).
Active autocratic resistance to the spread of democracy on international level that
Ambrosio claims exists has been closely scrutinized by Burnell (2010), who observes what he
denotes as ‘autocracy promotion’, as either fairly recent global phenomena or simply an
acknowledgement that such political developments are indeed taking place. An inclusive
definition of autocracy promotion according to Burnell encompasses “deliberate attempts to
influence a regime in an anti-democratic direction, the diffusion of authoritarian values across
borders and the borrowing or imitation of foreign models of authoritarian rule and their
institutions, which may happen with or without the active encouragement of the
authoritarian source. In international forums, assisting other regimes’ efforts to counter the
pressures and inducements to democratize that come from international democracy
promoters. Doing ‘business as usual’ with a regime in a way that gives it greater freedom to
determine its political trajectory vis-à-vis all its international partners.” (2010(a): 6)
Important questions abound, however: What the international promotion of
63
authoritarian rule actually comprises? How extensive it is and how it is related to the idea of
exporting autocracy? For Burnell the difficulty in answering these questions stems from the
fact that governments and politics of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes such as
China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, significantly differ among themselves. In
addition, under a considerable doubt is the idea that these regimes are sincerely seeking to tilt
other states’ regimes toward an authoritarian mode of governance; are they not rather
seeking to promote their own national and commercial interests? Could it possibly be the case
that ‘the consequences for upholding or increasing authoritarian rule elsewhere are largely
incidental’? Burnell acknowledges that autocracy promotion in more general terms does exist,
and calls for the need on the part of democracy promotion community to take seriously the
notion that political authoritarianism and semi-authoritarianism could spread across borders
by varied ways or means described in his concept of autocracy promotion.
Ambrosio (2010) develops a notion of ‘authoritarian diffusion’, similar to Burnell’s
concept of ‘autocracy promotion’, by applying a broader literature on diffusion and on
democratic diffusion in particular to authoritarian outcomes. The idea of diffusion in this
context, its non-coercive variant, rests on the assumption that authoritarians are not
undertaking attempts to forcibly impose their form of government on other states, but rather
they take a defensive stance to protect regime sovereignty and ensure that West’s regime
change endeavor is delegitimized.
The two central elements of authoritarian diffusion constitute appropriateness, i.e. an
increase in the legitimacy of authoritarianism would lead to the spread of autocratic norms
and practices throughout the international system, and effectiveness of autocratic forms of
government, i.e. authoritarian form of development serving as a model for other countries to
emulate. In addition, there are contributing factors at play that enhance authoritarian
diffusion: geographic proximity, linkage, international organizations, major power prestige,
and reference group of countries which have adopted a behavior being diffused. Generally
Ambrosio’s theorizing about possible phenomena of authoritarian diffusion taking place and
his general ideas about the shifts in international system and the possibility of the beginning
of a new reverse wave of democratization, while highly contestable, nonetheless serves as an
important venue for future research.
Ambrosio’s insights are echoed in Chestnut’s (2010) study of diffusion in an
authoritarian setting. She refutes the ‘diffusion’ hypothesis of democratization that
authoritarian regimes are less capable of ‘learning’ and adapting. Political agency, diffusion
and international influence while favoring the pro-democracy movements, can also contribute
64
to the maintenance of authoritarian stability. China is an example of unexpected adaptability;
since 1989 the leaders of PRC have sought to gather information and learn the causes of
instability of other authoritarian regimes and adapt policies to counter similar problems at
home. Thus, theoretical arguments about democratic diffusion must be re-conceptualized to
include what Chestnut denotes as ‘counter-diffusion’ – the acquisition and employment of
anti-democratic repressive strategies on the part of the state, i.e. how the authoritarian
regimes respond to the transnational diffusion of democratization strategies.
Bader et.al. (2010) scrutinizes a prevailing proposition that non-democratic regional
powers are to be blamed for the persistence of entrenched autocratic regimes in their
neighborhood. Through an application of a rational choice analysis to the country cases in the
regional environments of Russia and China, it is argued that indeed autocracies strongly
prefer autocratic neighbors over democratic ones, yet at the same time support for
autocratisation abroad is unlikely should there arise an expectation that it could lead to
political instability at home or threaten national security in some way.
As
seen
from
above,
existing
theoretical
and
empirical
assessments
of
authoritarianism’s international outreach is yet very scant, focused as it is predominantly on
the roles of China and Russia, as “the two main suspects of being foreign sources of influence
on authoritarian maintenance, revival or return” (Burnell 2010(a): 1). Scholars across fields of
comparative democratization and international relations have grown increasingly engaged in
a widespread discourse of an emerging speculation that non-democratic forms of rule are
now widely resurgent and even contagious across borders, which in turn raises concerns
about the implications for the spread of democracy and international democracy support.
Burnell and Schlumberger (2012) open up a venue for further research on “the
influence of international politics on national political regimes”, examining whether serious
competition in the form of autocracy promotion is plausible given the current state of global
democratization and the present conditions of international democracy promotion. They
claim that “the global rule seems to be a remarkable resilience of non-democratic rule, and a
new trend towards the (re-) authoritarianization of political regimes.” (p.3) One expects in the
future an expansion of analytical research that deals with international determinants of
national political regime developments.
IR scholarship has been faced with a fundamental question of determining how much
influence, and what kind of influence, the domestic political context exerts on a state’s
international behavior. How and in what ways the domestic environment impinges on foreign
policy? Hardly any of the prevailing schools of thought completely disregard the domestic
65
sphere of foreign policy in international relations. Even neo-realists acknowledge that
international dynamics cannot explain everything.
The overarching inquiry in this chapter revolved around the question of how being an
authoritarian impacts, if at all, on a regime’s foreign policy behavior and international system
in general? The idea was to initially delve into the Democratic Peace Paradigm’s essential
premises and weave out the ways in which it can possibly shed some light on the
international behavior of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes.
We have seen in Part I that the democratic peace debate is focused almost entirely on
how democratic institutions affect the conflict proneness of states, the relationship between
democracy and conflict behavior, allocating a somewhat residual sub-study to authoritarian
regimes’ conflict behavior. The study on the conflict proneness of authoritarian states has
revealed that indeed there are variations in the conflict behavior of certain types of
authoritarian regimes, pointing specifically to the difference between non-personalist
authoritarian leaders and personalist dictatorships.
Presented in Part II is the literature that takes seriously the impact of internal
dynamics on authoritarian states’ international behavior. General findings that link foreign
policy behavior of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes to the logic of their domestic
politics tells us that authoritarian regimes generally seek to:
∗ establish closer ties with other authoritarian regimes, providing a mixture of economic,
diplomatic, military and political aid to bolster their regimes
∗ promote an idea of the world where nations do not interfere in one another’s affairs
∗ champion authoritarian state-led economic development as a model of domestic
governance
∗ take a defensive stance to protect regime sovereignty and ensure that West’s regime
change endeavor is delegitimized
∗ actively resist or counter the spread of Western liberal democracy
Clearly foreign policy behavior of authoritarian regimes that remain in a substantial
number across the world should be subjected to much more systematic examination and not
only as far as their conflict behavior is concerned. The study that cuts across the disciplines of
66
international relation and comparative politics examines the question of how political
regimes shape foreign policy. This is a new underdeveloped field of research that significantly
points to the inevitable effect of domestic politics on foreign policies of states.
Overall, what we have seen in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 is how a string of
recent research on authoritarian regimes cogently argues for a renewed attention to be paid
to the sustainability, resilience and adaptability of such regimes in the context of a democratic
recession and changes in the international system. The subsequent chapters will focus on
Russia as a case study. As has been mentioned in the Introduction, Russia has specifically been
chosen for this analysis. The nature of the prevailing regime in Moscow will be examined and
defined within the parameters of the theoretical discussion relevant for this analysis.
67
“At present, there is no scenario for Russia without the great
survivalist Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin”10
Chapter 4. Russia’s authoritarian political regime: sources of resilience
We have seen in Chapter 2 that a distinct direction in scholarship of comparative
politics had emerged in late 1990’s in order to examine political regimes that coupled formal
democratic institutions with authoritarian practices. Russia is one of the field’s major case
studies. Overall, the case of Russia has been described, as one where there was an initial
democratic opening, with relative pluralism and national elections in place, yet what has
emerged over time was a new form of authoritarianism. This analysis aims to contribute to the
knowledge accumulated on Russia and in particular widen the understanding of how internal
and external factors influence the political situation in the country. Chapter 5 that follows will
examine further how Russia’s political system helps craft its foreign policy course.
Chapter 2 introduced notions of ‘hybrid regime’, ‘semi-authoritarianism’, ‘disguised
dictatorship’, and ‘competitive authoritarianism’, among others, created with the aim of
scrutinizing a new face of authoritarian rule. All of these concepts have been and are used to
portray Russia, which shows that characterizing a specific nature of the prevailing Russian
political regime as ‘authoritarian with adjective’ has already become generally accepted.
Indeed, in the Western policy and academic circles, a widespread belief prevails that Russia is
not a democracy, even though a debate still continues on whether or not it ever had been a
democracy during the time of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin (1992-1999).
Russia’s post-Soviet transition was characterized by ever-shifting process with the
early 1990’s having seen attempts to establish a new political system. During that period,
developments in Russia were viewed by a majority of scholars through the lens of
democratization, and categorized as a case of a “protracted” democratic transition (McFaul,
1999)11. Yet what Yeltsin had put in place could hardly have been dubbed a liberal democracy,
rather a modest political opening with multiparty elections.
A recent study by Petrov, Lipman and Hale (2010) treats Russia as an ‘overmanaged
democracy’, a type of hybrid regime with a highly centralized state control with democratic
institutions being systematically replaced with a whole network of substitutions to serve some
of their functions, created by and dependent on the central authorities. It is argued that this
type of political system differs from other types of hybrid regimes in that there is a higher
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, “Putin and the Uses of History”, The National Interest, January 4, 2012 (accessed
January 29, 2012)
11 See also for example Colton and Hough (1998); Aron (2000); Nichols (2001)
10
68
degree of centralization, less space for political competition and the substitutions of
democratic institutions are its central elements. By means of establishing a “non-participation
pact” with society, the ruling Russian government seeks to reap maximum benefits for itself
out of democracy, primarily with the aim of legitimizing state authority.
However, judging by the state of current political developments taking place in Russia,
it is quite clear that it is no longer ‘in transition’ to democracy as many democratization
scholars had initially hoped for and thus a tendency to conceptualizing the nondemocratic
regime of Russia through the prism of democracy should altogether be abandoned.
Chapter 2 outlined the theoretical analysis of contemporary non-democratic regimes,
examining domestic and external sources of their resilience. In order to show how this is so,
this part of the present analysis will examine at length the internal and external causes of why
and how an authoritarian regime in Russia lasts? On the domestic level, it suffices to ponder
the nature of a political regime in Russia and specific factors that since the early 1990s have
contributed to solidification of authoritarian trends, with a particular focus on the presidency
of Vladimir Putin as the most decisive figure in the Russian political arena to date, surrounded
and supported by a elite group that defines and sets the rules of the political game.
This study chooses to speak of “the Putin regime” in order to emphasize the
significance that actors and the system play in an amalgamation in the case of Russia. Russia’s
political system is based on the leadership of a specific autocrat, surrounded by a circle of an
elite group that defines and sets the rules of the political game. It is argued that leadership
personality plays a quite significant role in the context of any discourse on Russia’s current
political system. Making all the more relevant the question of who governs the country? At the
same time, the very notion of a political ‘regime’ as a system of governance, utilized
throughout this study, highlights the importance of posing the question of how a country is
governed, which crucially involves a discussion that would encompass a wider set of
determinative factors apart from incumbent state leadership, to include the domestic
institutional setting, policies and rules.
Furthermore, it will be questioned: how, if at all, do international politics and external
environment foster and enhance authoritarianism in Russia’s domestic political setting?
Part I. The domestic factors protracting an authoritarian rule in Russia
A consolidated state under the Putin regime
The main studies on authoritarianism covered in Chapter 2 put much more emphasis
69
on the ruling elites’ capacity to withstand opposition challenges and foster regime endurance.
What kinds of instruments are at the disposal of the ruling authorities in Russia in order to
survive in office?
The 1990s period under Boris Eltsin’s presidency in Russia were characterized as a
time of instability, organizational weakness, sharp economic decline, and a dramatic
transformation of political and economic institutions. The economy saw 24% decrease by
1993 and further 40% by 199612. Weak legal and political institutions were prevailing
alongside a massive privatization of state assets in the 1990s, causing a rise in income
inequality and a widespread dissatisfaction among the public. In a public opinion surveys of
1991-1995 period, when asked to characterize the political situation in the country, 51% of
Russians thought that anarchy was in reigns, and when asked: ‘What is more needed for our
society now: order or democracy?’, more than three-quarters gave priority to order and only
10% to democracy (Levada, 1995).
Observers stress that state cohesion was very low and central control was ruptured
following the collapse of the Soviet state, economy and Communist Party as the central pillars
of control and order. According to Kahn (2002) and Stoner-Weiss (2006) this has in turn
triggered regional leaders to act semi-independently of central government, setting up and
administering their own policies and laws concerning for example tax collection and
privatization, leading to sub-national noncompliance with Moscow on a quite extensive scale.
The beginning of the new millennium, with Vladimir Putin’s arrival to executive office
in Moscow, has witnessed a dramatic change in the political climate in Russia. Following what
has been described as a successful counteroffensive military campaign in Chechnya, Putin’s
approval rating soared in the wake of the 2000 presidential campaign. At the same time,
Russian voters were found of Putin’s youth and energy and for them he represented an end to
the volatile and unpredictable Kremlin politics. He was regarded as a strong and determined
leader. Yet another important factor contributing to Putin’s victory was the lack of an effective
opposition. The Community Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was in the lead among
the opposition parties in electoral politics, yet it has failed to secure enough votes for its
leader, Gennady Zyuganov (McFaul, 2001).
From the very beginning of his first term in office, Putin’s domestic political and
economic agenda was directed at strengthening centralized authority and maintaining control
across the vast country. “Russia needs strong state power and must have it…strong state
12
World Bank World Development Indicators, at www.worldbank.org/data
70
power in Russia is a democratic, law-based, capable, federal state,” Putin underlined13. In a
way, Putin’s course of action was necessary to prevent further state capture by powerful
elites, who had accumulated wealth and power under Yeltsin to set the rule of the game in the
economy. Putin has brought the economy under state control, by nationalizing key economic
sectors, primarily the energy industry, by gaining full control of Gazprom, the monopoly gas
company that was previously semi-autonomous (M Goldman 2008: 136).
At the same time Putin sought to reconfigure the relationship between the state and
businesses by fighting the most famous of oligarchs: Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and
Lebedev. Putin sought to ‘liquidate the oligarchs as a class’, by using state power to take away
their assets, and filing civil and criminal actions against them. As a result, Russian billionaires
“had become subjects of a regime with the will to deprive them of their wealth if they stepped
out of line politically” (Rose, et.al 2011: 47)
Since 1999 the Russian economy averaged 7 percent, characterized by budget
surpluses, twentyfold increase in the stock market, the eradication of foreign debt and the
accumulation of massive hard-currency reserves – at $598 billion in 2008, the third largest in
the world after China and Japan. The rise in world oil prices accounted for half of Russian
growth during this period. It was a part of the BRIC group of the world’s fastest-growing
emerging markets (the others are Brazil, India, and China). During this period of relative
economic prosperity, growth spread to both the middle class and the poor. Unemployment
went down by half from 12.9 percent in 1999 to 6.3 percent in 2008. Overall the society had
expressed support for the state’s policies and Putin’s popularity among the public has been
steadily growing.
At the same time McFaul and Stoner-Weiss (2008) emphasize that public safety, health,
corruption and the security of property rights have not shown any real change relative to
Eltsin’s era. Under Putin, the frequency of terrorist attacks in Russia has increased, overall
murder rate also has increased, and there are relatively more casualties in the ongoing
Chechen conflict than there was prior to 1996. In terms of public health, the data shows that
government heath spending has not increased substantially over the course of last decade;
there is decreasing fertility and increasing mortality rate that has worsen since 1998, life
expectancy has declined, with no-communicable diseases being the leading cause of death.
The fact that these negative trends did not lead to a widespread social unrest is largely
attributed to the Putin regime’s success in creating in a relatively short period of time a strong
13
Vladimir Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletiy,” Nezavisiamay Gazeta, December 30, 1999
71
state power that involved a heavy reliance on coercive organizations – such as the military,
the police, and the secret police. The Russian state coercive agencies are known as ‘power
ministries’, and ‘siloviki’ are officials who run those power ministries, being former members
of the Soviet secret police, the Committee of State Security (KGB) and other security services
of the state. Thus, the ruling authorities have at their disposal a sizeable security apparatus
with an objective of aiding Putin in restoring the authority and effectiveness of the federal
government. This in turn has brought into question the future of democracy in Russia under
Putin; some were pointing out that Putin was indifferent to democratic principles and
practices…“believing that Russia might have to sacrifice democracy in the short run to achieve
‘more important’ economic and state-building goals” (McFaul, 2001: 344).
Having won re-election with more than 70 percent vote in a popular ballot in 2004,
Putin has continued his agenda of consolidating the Russian state, creating a ‘strong political
vertical’, strengthening a sense of Russian national pride, monopolizing control over major
economic assets and restricting autonomy of regional governors by creating seven supraregional district administrators accountable to the president; five of the seven district
governors were generals. As has been noted, by this time, “Russia’s experiment with open
politics was over”. (Fish, 2005: 1)
By the end of his second term in office in 2008 Putin has managed to build a non-competitive
political system with pro-presidential United Russia party in place as the leading political
party.
The United Russia party originated in 2001 as the merger of three out of seven political
parties represented in the Duma: Unity, Fatherland, and All Russia. We have seen in Chapter 2
from the literature on the role of dominant parties in authoritarian states that such parties
serve as one of the essential tools of control by autocrats over their regimes. Since its
inception and electoral triumph in both 2003 and 2007 (securing a constitutional majority in
the chamber, gaining 315 seats out of 450 parliamentary seats) United Russia became the
principal party in Russia. It became one of the major instruments of rule by the Kremlin –
what Russians call ‘ the party of power’ (partiya vlasti) and some Western scholars dubbed ‘a
true dominant party’ that constitutes a mutual investment by Kremlin and regional elites as a
way to overcome their commitment problem (Reuter and Remington 2009:521).
The United Russia presented a useful devise for the Kremlin because it ensured ‘solid,
consistent, reliable majorities in legislative voting, both in the Duma and in regional
legislatures’, represent the Kremlin in time of elections as made up of followers of Putin to
raise further the party’s popularity (Remington 2010). The party relies heavily on patronage,
72
managing the careers and ambitions of politicians. Other parties’ existence and formation was
made difficult by the number of legislative provisions on political parties initiated by Putin,
those that ensured tough registration requirements and other administrative restrictions, as
well as large-scale manipulation of elections in order to ensure that the dominant party wins
by large margins. As a result, no opposition party today presents a real challenge to the
regime. Thus the ascendancy and dominance of United Russia has signified an emergence of a
new political system, in which there is a leading party that serves as one of the multiple
instruments of vertical power created by Putin.
The centralized power vested in Putin and his close associates holds together a quite
cohesive state apparatus, a firm grip on the economy, while at the same time paying much
attention to disguising authoritarian personalized rule as democracy to the Russian public. In
2005, Putin emphasized in his State of the Nation address to parliament that Russia ‘will
decide for itself the pace, terms and conditions of moving towards democracy.’14 There has
been much rhetoric on the part of the Russian leadership stressing that the country is set on
the democratic course of its political development, a form of democracy that was termed
‘managed’ and then ‘sovereign’.
The latter concept emerged in 2006, following a serious of publications and speeches
by Vladislav Surkov, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office. Most
notable is Surkov’s article entitled “Nationalization of the Future. Paragraphs pro sovereign
democracy”, where sovereign democracy is defined as “the way of political life in society
when the authorities, their institutions and their acts are elected, formed and directed only by
the Russian nation through its diversity and integrity in order to provide material prosperity,
freedom and justice for citizens, social groups and for people the nation consists of” (Surkov,
2006). Ergo, the idea was that Russian citizens themselves determine the form and
functioning of their country’s political system.
Sovereignty as national independence is not merely seen as a right, in the view of the
Kremlin, it is represented as a capacity that stands for economic independence, military
strength and cultural identity. Moreover sovereignty incorporates another key element that
should be emphasized, that of a ‘nationally-minded’ elite. Thus the sovereign is defined not as
the people or the voters but the reason embodied in the consensus of the responsible national
elites.
14
BBC News, “Putin deplores collapse of USSR”, 25 April, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4480745.stm
73
Medvedev’s modernization objectives
When Dmitry Medvedev replaced Putin in 2008 as Russia’s third president, ‘sovereign’
democracy rhetoric has somewhat subsided and has been replaced to a large measure with
the rhetoric of strengthening the rule of law, addressing endemic corruption and modernizing
the country. ‘No European country can boast of such universal disregard for the law as can
Russia’, Medvedev has emphasized (quoted in Edwards 2009). In fact specific in case of Russia
is a widespread prevalence of the use and abuse of administrative resources at the expenses
of formal frameworks of governance.
Medvedev initiated and promoted a new anti-corruption legislation shortly after his
inauguration as president. He declared corruption as a key threat to Russian modernization
and social stability and announced anti-corruption policy as one of the top priorities of his
presidential program.
Addressing endemic corruption is critical to improving the society’s trust and
confidence in the governance system and boosting foreign direct investment. Transparency
International’s 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Russia 147 out of 180 countries,
noting an eight-year downward trend. An analysis undertaken by Frye (2010) reveals that
given Russia’s high levels of education and relative wealth, its corruption ratings are worse
than expected. Reducing corruption and promoting the rule of law are two interrelated
problems of technical and political nature. On a more optimistic note, Frye argues the country
has made considerable progress in modernizing the technical aspects of its legal institutions
over the past 20 years.
The idea of modernizing Russia has previously featured widely in Putin’s public
speeches and it was with the arrival of Medvedev that the idea has become a central policy
agenda of development. In his 2009 liberal manifesto “Go Russia!”15 Medvedev stressed that
Russia is lagging behind developed countries in science, technology and economics. He
proclaimed five priorities to achieve the goal of modernization of Russia: improve energy
production and transportation efficiency, raise nuclear technologies to world’s standards,
upgrade information technology by using “supercomputers” and other equipment, develop
the country’s ground and space infrastructure by putting new space satellites into orbit,
become a leader in the production of medical equipment and medicines for the treatment of
various diseases. 38 major modernization projects are planned to be undertaken in these five
Medvedev, Dmitry (2009) “Go, Russia!” Published 10 September, available at:
http://eng.kremlin.ru/speeches/2009/09/10/1534_type104017_221527.shtml
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priority spheres as part of Medvedev’s latest drive to liberate Russia from what he dubbed a
‘humiliating’ reliance on oil and gas exports, and to revive the greatness of a nation
traditionally known for scientific and technological achievements.
Building a ‘Russian Silicon Valley’ as one of the primary objectives with the Skolkovo
Innovation Center to be devoted to innovation in communications and biomedicine, as well as
in space, nuclear, and information technologies. Apart from the Skolkovo project, the
president has allocated more than $10 billion for tech investment and in his 2008 blueprint
for the Russian economic, “Strategy 2020”, called for tech sector to make up 15 percent of
exports or 10 percent of GDP by 2020, which at the moment accounts for nearly 1.1 percent of
GDP. (Matthews and Nemtsova, 2010: 26) His modernization agenda represents a top-down
state-led approach to development and is restricted to a technological progress. It appears
that Medvedev has aimed to establish a centrally planned high-tech, ‘knowledge’ economy.
This stands as an ambitious, yet an extremely arduous task and a considerable number of
observers firmly doubt appropriateness of developing a competitive nanotechnology industry
for a country at Russia’s stage of economic development.16
State-sponsored modernization cannot be achieved overnight and it requires serious
political will to implement reforms and provide incentives in order compensate for the
negative investment climate. It is in no way an easy objective to move from an oil and gas
economy to one that can successfully compete in nanotechnologies. The truth is that changing
the Russian economic climate will take a long time and much effort on the part of the state in
order to make significant strides forward in modernizing its economy.
Russia represents a capitalist economy that is more or less open to private
entrepreneurship, as far as its ‘nonstrategic’ sectors are concerned. Russia’s international
scores for economic, competitiveness, business friendliness and transparency and corruption
remain low, while the role of government in the economy and business sector is excessive.
Russia has sought to integrate into the world economy on its own terms with the energy
sector assuming the leading position in terms of development.
In its latest Global Competitiveness report, the World Economic Forum (2011) ranked
Russia in 66th place among the world’s most competitive nations, which is a drop of 15 places
since Medvedev became the president in 2008. The report stresses that despite the overall
macroeconomic stability achieved, the most substantial obstacles to Russia’s competitiveness
are its weak institutional framework and the low efficiency of its goods market. Russia is
see for example Richard Connolly, “State-led Modernization in Russia: The Nanotechnology Industry”, Russian
Analytical Digest, #105, 5 December 2011
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advised to take advantage of its main strengths, namely its ‘high innovation potential, its large
and growing market size and its solid performance in higher education and training’ (p. 6).
In 2009 Russia suddenly faced a sharp fall of 8 percent of its economic output, oil price
decrease and a reversal of capital flows and is believed to be one of the worse affected by the
global economic crisis (Guriev and Tsyvinski, 2010). Letting some to claim that Russia is now
a ‘post-BRIC’, i.e. it has lost much of its pre-economic crisis self-confidence (Judah, et.al.
2011:57).
Nonetheless, according to Aslund, et al. (2010) Russia has dealt quite successfully with
the economic crisis and is unlikely to face significant financial problems in the foreseeable
future. Its current account surplus remains impressive and its international currency
reserves, at $436 billion in mid-March 2010, still remain the third largest in the world. It is in
the possession of substantial assets – natural resources and human capital. Oil revenues
allowed the government to pay off much of public wage arrears and its foreign debt. However,
it is argued that the country is facing vast structural challenges in the long run (p.260). The
Ministry of Economic Development of Russia forecasted that between 2010 and 2013 Russia
will require about $1 trillion in order to implement ambitions plans to restore crumbling
Soviet infrastructure such as railways, schools and hospitals and the state budget can only
cover a third of that sum (Matthews and Nemtsova(b), 2010:26).
Undoubtedly, should world oil prices remain high, the Russian government may choose
to delay restructuring the economy. As a result, the country will continue suffering from a
‘resource curse’17 that impinges to a large extent upon needed socio-economic reforms. Thus
what remains of utmost importance is introduction of economic policies aimed at
diversification of economy away from its heavy dependence on production and export of
commodities. Although Russia is not as an extreme petrostate: even though energy presently
accounts for two-thirds of Russia’s exports, it is not more than one-fifth of its GDP. According
to World Bank’s forecast, the real GDP in Russia in 2011 stood at 4%, for 2012 the projection
is that the GDP will reach 3.8%18 as the ruling elites continue to grapple with the
consequences of the global financial crisis.
Medvedev’s objectives of deregulating business and promoting innovation were very
promising. However, as most scholars concur, modernization requires building effective
The term is used to describe a paradox that countries rich in natural resource tend to have less economic
growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. Auty, Richard M. (1993)
Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis. London: Routledge
18 The World Bank in Russia, Russian Economic Report, # 26, September 2011, available at
http://www.worldbank.org.russia
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political and economic institutions with substantive – not merely rhetorical claims – to
improving the rule of law, ensuring protection of property rights, and lowering corruption.
Medvedev himself has claimed that he is “a supporter of the values of democracy in the form
that humanity has developed them over the last few centuries. My definition of democracy as
the power of the people is in no way different from classical definitions that exist in all
countries” and acknowledged that “without political freedom it would be impossible to
reform successfully.”
19
Medvedev has been praised for some notable achievements in the
legal sphere, tax reform and attempts to introduce more political plurality in Russia. However,
in the course of last six years since Medvedev’s grand modernization plan was announced,
little progress has been achieved in implementing the priority objectives.
There were those who had regarded Medvedev as a true reformer, whose innovative
ideas have come across a strong resistance on the part of those elites in the government loyal
to Putin. However, it is argued that there is no substantial difference in policy between Putin
and Medvedev; both have aimed for a renewal of structural reforms to improve efficiency and
governance. It has now become quite clear that Medvedev was merely Putin’s substitute for a
presidential term because of the constitutional limitations upon presidential term limit.
Medvedev, being not only Putin’s successor but also his long-time colleague, himself has
acknowledged throughout this term in office that “his presentation and demeanor may be
different, but in terms of policy and goals he would not differ from his predecessor” (Wegren
and Herspring, 2010:6). During Medvedev’s presidency, Putin, serving as prime minister, has
remained quite influential, in what came as the two-headed system to be widely known as
‘tandemocracy’.
It must be stressed that the balance of power in the Kremlin has remained unaltered
despite the much-praised transition of office from Putin to Medvedev without changes to the
Constitutional rules. In other words, there was little departure from a regime in place much
influenced by Putin during Medvedev’s presidency.
The 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections in Russia and their consequences
In 2011, Russia, being a multiparty elections autocracy, is in the throws of an intense
political season with the December parliamentary elections resulting in a reconfiguration of
power in the State Duma - the lower chamber of parliament. It was clear from the analysis of a
number of scholars, presented in Chapter 2, that authoritarianism with elections may not lead
“Laying Down the Law: Medvedev Vows War on Russia’s ‘Legal Nihilism,’” Johnson’s Russia List, no.233,
December 26, 2008
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to democratization, at the same time, elections, manipulated as they are by the authorities, do
not guarantee that autocrats are protected in their grip on power. This applies clearly in the
case of Russia.
As a result of the elections, United Russia party has lost a significant number of Duma
seats, thereby loosing its ‘constitutional majority’, yet it has managed to secure a majority of
seats, even if much-reduced, for another five years. United Russia attained 49.5%, compared
to 64.3% in 2007; out of 450 seats, it won 238 seats, ceding 77 seats to their rivals –the
Communist Party (19.2%, 92 seats), A Just Russia (13.2%, 13 seats), and the Liberal
Democratic Party (11-7%, 56 seats).20 These outcomes and en masse street demonstrations
they have led to – with as many as 25,000 citizens, by official state statistics, coming out to
protest on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on December 10 and thousands more in a number of
other cities across Russia – have already been hailed by observers as a sign of a major shift in
Russia’s political landscape (see for example Cameron 2011; Kramer 2011).
Clearly these outcomes allow one to speak with some confidence that Russia no longer
is a ‘hegemonic-party autocracy’ to use Magalony (2006) terminology introduced in Chapter 2.
However, gaining an ‘absolute’ majority of seats still allows United Party to implement its
major policies without the need for a ‘constitutional’ majority, which is used to amend the
Constitution, something that happens quite rarely. The most important committees in the
Duma will remain under the control of United Russia party. In addition, as Medvedev stated,
United Russia would seek to forge a coalition with other political parties on certain issues.21
According to a number of scholars the outcomes of the latest Duma elections stand to
reveal a great deal about the relationship between the state and society in Russia and shed
light on country’s electoral politics, an element of Russia’s political setting that had been long
ignored by observers (Hale, 2011). At the same time, overly focusing on elections alone may
not reveal the whole picture. It must be stressed that fraud and abuse in the Russian elections
is nothing new and were quite widespread already during the 1990’s, under Eltsin’s relative
pluralism. Following both the 2003 parliamentary elections and 2004 presidential elections,
OSCE Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has noted that both
elections were characterized by abuse of state resources, electoral manipulation, media bias
Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, http://www.vybory.izbirkom.ru
Itar-Tass, “Ruling party to have to join coalitions, agree with opposition”, 05/12/2011, http://www.itartass.com/en/c39/289836.html
20
21
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and some fraud22. The same applies to the 2007 parliamentary elections during which
opposition access to the media was very limited and a highly restrictive political parties law
made it impossible for several liberal parties to compete (S Goldman 2008).
Throughout the 2011 Duma elections, the international observers have noted
extensive violations of basic democratic standards. It was claimed that the state authorities
have denied the opposition adequate media coverage, harassed opposition candidates and
their supporters and manipulated electoral results: there were attempts to stuff ballot boxes
and manipulate voter lists (OSCE Parliamentary Assembly 2011). McFaul and Petrov
(1998:319) emphasize that “direct falsification and various forms of interference [were and
remain] integral characteristics of Russian elections.”
At the same time, it is important to go beyond the electoral process and examine the
‘extra-electoral’ dimensions of non-democratic rule, emphasized by Snyder (2006) (presented
in Chapter 2). And perhaps nowhere it is more applicable than in case of Russia. Under first
two terms of Putin’s rule, there was clearly in place a benign domestic political setting with
strong public support from the society and the political elite alike. Putin’s approval ratings in
public opinion polls flared above 70% over the course of an extended period of time, which
undoubtedly is a striking achievement.
However, upon the recent public announcement that Putin intends to return to
Kremlin, Putin’s personal popularity has been waning. Putin’s popularity has dwindled to
record low of 23% in October-November 2011 (compared with 60% approval in the same
season in 2010). Medvedev’s ratings in the same time period are even lower, at 15%,
(previously at 51%)23. This must to a greater degree be a result of the so-called ‘voter fatigue’,
which may arise due to the realization on the part of the society that Putin will be in the office
for a long period of time.
March 4, 2012 elections of Russia’s president have indeed proven that, as the
quotation that opens this chapter emphasizes, Vladimir Putin is the ‘great survivalist’, securing
his return to power. Putin won the election by a wide margin over four other candidates,
obtaining 63.6 percent of the vote (whereas in 2000 Putin won 53% of the vote and 71 % in
2004). The second-place finisher was Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov with 17.9
percent. In third came billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov with 7.8 percent, while Liberal
ODIHR (2004) Russian Federation Elections to the State Duma, 7 December 2003, OSCE/ODIHR Election
Observation Mission Report. Warsaw: OSCE; ODIHR (2004) Russian Federation Presidential Elections, 14 March
2004, OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Report. Warsaw: OSCE
23 Levada Center, “Indexy. Odobrenie Vladimira Putina i Dmitria Medvedeva”, www.levada.ru/indeksy. Accessed
on December 12, 2011
22
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Democratic leader Vladimiar Zhirinovsky secured 6.2 percent. The last candidate, Just Russia
leader Sergei Mironov got 3.85 percent.24
The international observers, led by the OSCE, widely concur that the presidential
elections were seriously flawed, with conditions clearly skewed in favor of one of the
contestants – Prime Minister Putin, with notable procedural irregularities, including ballotstuffing, cases of group, proxy and multiple voting, vote counting deficiencies.25 While the
result of the presidential elections as no surprise to many, the future of political regime in Russia
designed as it was according to a model of state governance defined by the Putin regime remains
an open question. In other words, while it is now certain who will take up the incumbent
leadership, how will this effect the political system, given the recent critical developments in
terms of massive street demonstrations is yet to be seen.
Societal support for the regime, ‘voter fatigue’ and opposition strength
The plausible ‘voter fatigue’ has emerged suddenly in autumn of 2011 upon
Medvedev’s infamous announcement that he was supporting Putin’s return to the presidency,
while he would himself become prime minister after the March 2012 presidential elections.
Another event that exacerbated further the decline in mass support for the ruling tandem was
Putin’s subsequent statement that this ‘trading in places’ with Medvedev had been planned
long ago.
As forecasted by a scholar prior to the mass protests denouncing the Duma election results:
“The problem with the tandem construct is that it probably cannot go backwards, and the attempt to do
so by castling Medvedev to the prime ministerial post and Putin back to the presidency may
fundamentally undermine their model of political legitimation. It renders Medvedev a spent political
force, which makes it much more difficult to maintain expectations of gradual change and could
encourage the liberal segment of society to reunite in opposition to the government.”(emphasis
added)26
At the same time, according to the recent polls, more than half of the Russian public
mistrusts non-parliamentary government opposition and would not vote for any of the
opposition candidates at the presidential elections. 49% of respondents believe that the
opposition does not have a constructive program of action and only criticizes the
“Putin eases to third Presidential term”, Euronews, 5 March, 2012,
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/putin-wins-presidential-third-term-hands-down
25 ODIHR, International Election Observation, Russian Federation, Presidential Elections, 4 March, 2012,
Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions, http://www.osce.org7odihr/elections/88661
26 Indra Overland, “Modernization after Medvedev?”, Russian Analytical Digest, #105, 5 December 2011
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government.27 This shows that the Putin regime has had a stable and prolonged public
support for “it has become accepted as a lesser evil to alternatives” (Rose, et.al 2006).
As we have seen from above, in a short- and medium-term Putin’s initial state-building
achievements have brought political order and stability, especially if compared to the early
chaotic 1990’s of the Yeltsin era. However, endemic corruption and inflation remain quite
high and the recent Duma votes were a reflection of societal dissatisfaction with socioeconomic conditions in the country, which were relatively better in 2007 when United Russia
had more votes. In response to a polling question: “Do you think that things in our country are
developing in the right direction or is our country going in the wrong direction?” only 36% of
Russian respondents answered positively in 2011, compared to 61% in 2008.28
A recent survey reveals that the majority of Russians view inequality of opportunity to
be very high in their country. There is low trust in the capitalist economy and low support for
private property rights. Most believe that political connections and criminal activity matter
more than talent in acquiring wealth. It was further found that most Russians do not favor
economic and political liberalization: only 36 percent support democracy and 28 percent
support market reform, which is the lowest among all transition countries. (Denisova, Eller
and Zhuravskaya, 2010).
At the same time it appears that, having been a ruling party for a considerable period
of election cycles, United Russia has encountered the ‘voter fatigue’ with the Russian public,
parallel to the one possibly in place in relation to Putin, as mentioned above. Overall, by all
measures the public support for the political regime has indeed markedly fallen, but it should
be recalled that previously it was quite high enabling a further support of the system of
government by a substantial percentage of Russians at least in the medium term future.
Rose, et.al. (2011) argue that ‘all forms of government require popular support,
whether voluntary or involuntary’(p.1). In case of Russia, it is claimed that the Russian elite
were able to mobilize a substantial amount of popular support for their increasingly
undemocratic regime (emphases added). Exactly how has the state authority managed to
mobilize support to build an existing political system? Based on the extensive analysis of the
New Russian Barometer surveys29, the Russian case reveals that an undemocratic regime just
Levada Center, “Vybory v Gosdumu, chast’ 3. Ob oppozitsii i kritike vlasti”, 7 December, 2011,
www.levada.ru/07-12-2011/vybory-v-gosdumu-chast-3-ob-oppozitsii-i-kritike-vlasti, Accessed on December 9,
2011
28 Levada Center surveys 2000-2011, Russia Votes. National Issues-Trends,
www.russiavotes.org/national_issues/national_issues_trends.php#066, Accessed on 10 December 2011
29 The first survey was launched in 1992. Each survey has a nationwide sample of 1600 to 2000 respondents;
fieldwork is carried out by the Levada Center, available at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cspp/catalog1_0.shtml
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as a democratic one can mobilize voluntary support or at least the resigned acceptance of the
mass of its population, constituting “a striking challenge to theories of the inevitability of
democratization” (p.77).
The primary factors that have accounted for the support by the Russian public of their
political establishment are that the overwhelming majority of Russians feel freer today than
during the Soviet times; an extremely strong effect on support for the regime stems from how
Russians evaluate the national economic system; there is also ‘the passage of time’ element,
i.e. the fact that the regime has lasted for two decades. In addition, even though Russians tend
to describe their regime as corrupt, untrustworthy and undemocratic, a majority of
respondents do not endorse any alternative to the current regime; this suggests that
“Russians have low expectations of government”(p.97).
The latest Duma elections street demonstrations were the biggest public rallies since
the 1990s, even if still only a portion of 1 percent of voters came out on the streets;
undoubtedly and by all measures, the Russian public has suddenly become politically active.
What does this altered public mood mean for the country’s political future? Some experts
were (see for example Aslund 2011) quick to claim that a liberal awakening in Russia could be
brought by a growing civil society. It is indeed premature to claim that the latest events will
lead to a regime change. For what is substantially lacking is a united cause on the part of
opposition, which includes liberals, nationalists and leftists; there is no organizational
structure in seeking popular support, so that “all they have is a bunch of informal leaders,
with their marginal parties effectively barred by the Kremlin from the political field. None of
these leaders has nationwide awareness, let alone support”.30
Indeed, societal dissatisfaction has notably grown since the late 2010, but opposition
strength is quite weak and unable to foster a coherent and influential force to face the ruling
regime. A professor at the Moscow University of Finance stated, “opposition forces are clearly
aware of the power of Putin and United Russia. Self-promotion is driving them to participate
in the elections’ 31.
The Kremlin employs three major tools to deal with regime opponents, according to
Silitski (2009). The primary tool is ‘political technology’ which constitutes information and
propaganda campaigns designed to discredit and weaken regime opponents, including in the
‘virtual’ realm. The Russian authorities have increasingly become an active participant in the
A comment by Maria Lipman, “Duma Elections: Expert Analysis”, compilation of commentaries, December 13,
2011, available at: http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/12/13/duma-elections-2011/8kkf
31 Interviewed by the author in April 2011 in Moscow, Russia
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Russian blogosphere, competing with other actors there for influence. Already by late 1990s,
the authorities in Russia were concerned that the Internet freedom can potentially mobilize
mass social unrest and as a pre-caution have put in place legislation to enable online
surveillance, emphasizing that state protection and policing were essential.
In particular, at the time of elections, the Kremlin activates a network of supportive
bloggers and online media experts in order to engage in online discussions and provide
regime-friendly rhetoric to keep the level of political criticism from opposition as low as
possible. As was noted in Chapter 2, the Russian authorities employ the third generation of
content control to enhance state control over national cyberspace and building capabilities for
an ability to compete with their rivals in the virtual world. (Deibert and Rohozinski, 2010).
The Russian public opinion is undoubtedly manipulated by government propaganda.
However, Internet use among the public is on a sharp rise, providing unprecedented
opportunities for the Russian public to gain access to diverse sources, both domestic and
foreign, of news and information. It was noted that “between 2000 and 2008 the Russian
portion of cyberspace, or RUNET, has grown at an average rate of 7,208 percent, or over five
times the rate of the next faster region (Middle East) and 15 times faster than Asia…by latest
official estimates, 38 million Russians, or a third of the population of Russia are connected,
with over 60 percent of those surfing the Internet from home on broadband connections…by
official predictions, Russia’s Internet population is set to double to over 80 million users by
2012” (Deibert and Rohozinski (2010). Following the December 4th Duma elections, instances
of ballot irregularities were recorded by mobile devices and then posted on the Internet and
as a result: “outrage-and calls to protest-flashed from computer to computer with political
discourse thriving in blogs, tweets, posts to Facebook, uploads on YouTube-challenging the
regime’s old-media monopoly on news and opinion”.32
The second tool at the disposal of the ruling regime is more explicit prevention of any
opposition to the authorities, with opponents being disqualified from running for office, jailed,
exiled or even murdered. The third tool is the provision of material benefits for the society;
the regime is believed to have allowed citizens a degree of social autonomy. At the same time,
Silistki further argues that during his tenure as the president, Putin chose not to become an
absolute ruler out of considerations of Russia’s international prestige, a cogent argument to
be explored in the next section of the analysis.
Robert Conquest, “Halfway to where?”, NEWSWEEK Special Edition, Issues 2012, December 26, 2011/January 2,
2012
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Part II. The external factors protracting an authoritarian rule in Russia
International environment in the immediate post-Cold War period
In this part of the Chapter it will be argued that the international environment that has
emerged after the end of the Cold War has substantially contributed to autocratization of Russia
and a number of the more recent global events stand to further solidify Kremlin’s authoritarian
rule.
As we recall Carothers’ (2000) argument in Chapter 2, early 1990s were characterized
by a growing international expectation of democratic behavior, and that there was ‘the need
for democratic self-profiling on the international stage’. The international environment of the
1990s was highly favorable to democracy, creating significant external constraints on
autocrats, who were faced with a militarily, economically, and ideologically strong Western
powers.
Levisky and Way (2010) demonstrated that the level of linkage a country had with the
West was one of the most important factors in seeking to explain why some regimes after the
end of the Cold War became democratic and others reverted to competitive authoritarianism.
Strong linkages to the West, i.e. high density of economic, political, diplomatic, social ties,
meant that regimes democratized, while in case of low linkages, regime outcomes depend on
incumbents’ organizational power, i.e. the scope and cohesion of state and governing-party
structures.
In relation to Russia, Levitsky and Way stress that low Western democratizing
pressure, the so-called Western leverage and high organizational power have contributed to
authoritarian stability in the country in the post-Cold War period. Prevalence of high
organizational power is what we have discussed in Part 1 of this analysis, where emphasis
was on Putin’s objectives of creating a strong centralized authority, which he indeed had
managed to put in place.
Historically, there has been very low level of ties between the West and the Soviet
Russia as the Communist Party strictly controlled and restricted flows of people and
information to and from the West. Thus the country remained quite isolated from global
social, cultural and ideational trends. The collapse of the Soviet Union however has largely
contributed to an expansion of linkages with the West, although as Levitsky and Way claim
“the kind of linkage-based democratizing pressures seen in Eastern Europe and the Americas
were largely absent in the post-Soviet cases”(2010:185).
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Russia’s strategic importance for the West
Former Russian President Yeltsin had embraced closer ties with the West. Eltsin was
promoting the idea that Russia should emulate the West for it is part of Europe with which it
shares common values and therefore should develop in the same manner as the West. Eltsin
has turned to the US and the EU countries for guidance and as a result Western political
influence within the country mounted. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Western engagement was notable with ‘Western advisors invited to ‘occupy’
virtually every branch of the Russian government” (Goldgeier and McFaul 2003:59).
Alongside financial, economic and social assistance programs, a stream of Western
democracy promotion programs and agencies has started operating freely in the country
under Yeltsin. However, Kopstein and Reilly (2000) note that Russia’s engagement with the
West remained below expectations and that is accounted for by the fact that Russia stands
among countries that are “the remnant cores of formerly imperial powers that are especially
impervious to outside influence” and is geographically far remote from the West, making the
spatial diffusion of influence, institutions, norms and resources, necessary to the construction
of political democracy, problematic (p. 2 and 21).
This is indeed surprising given that following post-Soviet economic collapse, Russia
was highly vulnerable and there was plenty of opportunity for outside influence. A number of
close observers stress that the West’s disengagement with Russia in the 1990s, in terms of
exerting pressure for democratization, is the most decisive factor for the strengthened
authoritarian rule (McFaul 2001; Shevtsova (2010); Levisky and Way 2010).
Russia stood out as a particular case for its economic and strategic importance. From
the very beginning of relations, the Western states have acted cautiously towards Russia
because it was still “even at its weakest, a big state with vast military capacity” and massive oil
and gas reserves (Levisky and Way 2010: 187). The West had chosen to emphasize economic
ties and neglected political reforms while “relying on Eltsin and believing that he would
guarantee Russia’s transition”(Shevtsova 2010: 156). In the US, Russia was identified as a
democracy and the former US President Bill Clinton upon taking his first term in office had
pledged to support Eltsin in carrying out transformation reforms. However by the time of his
second term in office, Clinton had come to regard Eltsin as the ‘least bad’ of Russian
presidents (Marsden 2005: ch.2).
By the time of Putin’s reign, the ruling regime was largely immune from outside
pressure and was given an opportunity to fully consolidate. In Russia’s relations with the
West under Putin the accent was largely and increasingly economic, while in terms of political
85
development, the Western model was no longer one to emulate, as was the policy under
Eltsin. The US policy towards Russia remained largely unchanged and given Russia’s strategic
importance, made Putin “impervious to the criticism”33. Some analysts note further that there
was some degree of disappointment on the part of the Russian public with the results of
democracy and Western integration (McFaul and Spector, 2010:116).
The Russian authorities have regarded international criticisms expressed as an outside
interference in Russia’s internal affairs, as an attempt on the part of the West to use the
opposition as its tool of influence, which stands to further exacerbate the authority’s
suspicions and press harder on curtailing and monitoring civil society activities at home. At
the same time, Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric is growing and it was one of the major themes of
his candidacy campaign at the March 2012 presidential elections.
An outspoken critic of the conduct of the latest Duma elections was the US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton. In undiplomatically blunt manner she highlighted that the elections were
neither free nor fair. After the December elections in Duma Medvedev stated that it was up to
Russia to decide how many parties it should have. ‘When foreign partners observe the
election process in Russia, its one thing, but when they discuss its political system, it’s quite
another; its none of their business’34.
In the same way and in even harsher undertone, Prime Minister Putin, upon becoming
formally a candidate for the March presidency, has accused the US of encouraging protests
against his government. His accusations were primarily directed at US Secretary of State
Hilary Clinton, who, in his words ‘set the tone for opposition activists and gave them a
signal’35.
While clearly irritating the Kremlin with its constant criticisms of how undemocratic is
the ruling regime, the US’s policy toward Russia has more or less come down to accepting Russia
as it is. An ostensible improvement in relations between US and Russia following the ‘reset’
initiative in 2010 reflects Washington’s need for Russia’s cooperation on Iran, Afghanistan
and nuclear arms reductions. As a result in dealing with Russia, Obama administration largely
omitted discordant issues such as NATO expansion or democratization. The US has deprioritized Russia as it chose to focus on the Pacific (Clinton 2011), which in turn is
undoubtedly contributing to the strengthening of authoritarianism there.
“Putin’s Assertive Diplomacy is Seldom Challenged”, The New York Times, 27 December 2006
President Medvedev’s Meeting with Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Churov, December
6,2011 http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/3182
35 ‘Putin lashes out at Clinton over protests’, Euronews, December 8, 2011,
www.euronews.net/2011/12/08/putin-lashes-out-at-clinton-over-protests/
33
34
86
Especially noteworthy are the events following the 2003-2005 wave of the so-called
‘color revolutions’ in three of the former Soviet Union states, by the end of which Western
democracy aid programs were no longer welcomed in the country as the Russian ruling elites
have undertaken swift measures to insulate as much as possible their regime from the outside
influence.
The impact of the ‘Color revolutions’ and the “Arab Spring” on Russia’s domestic political
trajectory
The Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004) and
the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005) have emerged after unfair and rigged presidential
and parliamentary elections in each of these countries have lead to massive street protests
culminating in regime changes. These revolutions were claimed to have “raised the specter of
regional democratic contagion, which might spread to affect Russia itself”(Ambrosio
2009:42).
In a stark contrast to the Western interpretation of the ‘color revolutions’ as a product
of domestic forces (Ackerman and Duvall 2005; Hale 2005, 2006; McFaul 2005; Bunce and
Wolchik 2006; Demes and Forbrig, 2006), Russian analysts traced their origin to the outside
factors, interpreting them as a clear case of a regime change sponsored by the West and an
attempt on the part of the latter to encroach on Russia’s sphere of influence by pulling
countries such as Georgia and Ukraine away from it. (FBIS Report, 2004; Markov, 2005;
Volkova 2003) Although the Western scholarship still acknowledges that Western
governments, NGOs and foundations played a role in these revolutions, “albeit one that
facilitated and conditioned the events, not necessarily causing them”(McFaul and Spector,
2010:118).
As was emphasized in Chapter 1, by early 2007 democracy promotion efforts have
come to face the kind of challenges not yet seen since the end of the Cold War. The Western
democracy promotion enterprise has been faced with a strong ‘backlash’ on the part of
nondemocratic regimes around the world, being closely associated with the US regime change
agenda. Carothers (2006) points out that governments across the globe have condemned
democracy-building programs in their countries, denouncing them as “illegitimate political
meddling”, as American interventionism, not US foreign policy goal of democracy promotion.
Precisely this kind of perception on the part of the Russian ruling elite, namely that the
West was closely involved in the electoral changes in the neighboring countries, that has led
to the state to take strong measures to further erode democratic institutions in the country. A
87
general state of fear and suspicion of these developments was growing inside Kremlin and has
incentivized a significant change in how domestic and foreign policy were carried out. The
authorities in Russia have extensively justified curtailing of civil liberties and regional
autonomy due to the external threats. Kremlin’s response was to develop policies aimed at
diminishing Western influence within the country by the means of an extensive reform
package that included amendments to the Civil Code, the changes to the electoral law to
prevent foreign funding of parties and other aspects of electoral campaigns, the law on nonprofit organizations, the law on public associations, the law on closed administrative
territorial formations, amendments that broaden definition of extremism to include criticism
of public officials.
The government took measures to tighten control over NGO activities by passing “2006
NGO law”, which imposed rigid requirements for re-registration, disclosure of sources of
funds and annual reports and gave Russian governmental agencies broad mandates to
regulate foreign assistance for domestic NGOs (Klitsounova, 2009: 107). Government pressed
strong allegations that foreign intelligence organizations are using Russian NGOs for their
purposes and do not have the country’s best interests in mind.
The government allocated resources to create state-sponsored and state-controlled
organizations and in order to control civil society organizations developed its Public Chamber
Project. Another pre-emptive measure carried out by the authorities in order to prevent a
colored revolution in the country was to set up various youth movements, the leading of
which became “Nashi” (meaning Ours), which has overtime gained over 100,000 in members,
establishing branches in cities and regions across the country. The purpose of ‘Nashi’ is to
mobilize youth to attend government rallies and events, and to serve as a forum to promote
the ‘sovereign’ democracy ideas and ‘encourage patriotism and loyalty to the Russian regime’
(McFaul and Spector 2010:127).
At the same time, the Kremlin has begun to extensively champion a non-Western form
of government inside Russia under the slogans of ‘sovereign’ democracy. The concept of
‘sovereign’ democracy, discussed in Part I of this analysis, has specifically been constructed in
response to the color revolutions and a sense of concern the events have generated among the
political elites. Interestingly enough, the sovereign democracy project did not entail the
creation of ‘Russian uniqueness’ theories that would lay emphases on Russia’s exceptionalism.
The Kremlin’s major policy thinkers, who in fact are not political philosophers but publicrelations specialists, have pointed to what they saw as a threatening amalgamation of
88
international pressure from above and populist pressure from below as in case of Ukraine,
where Kuchma’s regime was destroyed following the Orange revolution (Krastev 2006).
Clearly, the electoral revolutions in the neighboring states have substantially contributed
to further solidifying the Kremlin’s authoritarian rule. In addition, the fact that the ‘color
revolutions’ have turned out to be disappointing experiences clearly played into hands of the
Kremlin. Indeed, the subsequent developments in all the three countries have illustrated how
ephemeral a successful democratic protest can be, prompting an observer to note in reference
to Georgia, that “it was only later that the revolutionary leader’s lack of understanding of
democratic ideals and principles, and their disinclination to follow them, became apparent”
(Khutsishvili 2009:68). The same applies in case of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where following
the revolutions the leaders promised their people substantive reform and democratization,
yet have quickly failed to meet the expectations and renewed cynicism among people of these
countries has prevailed.
The Kremlin has sought to exploit the failures of the color revolutions to its advantage
with extensive public speeches and pro-Kremlin publications stressing the failures and
inadequacy of such ways of bringing about change. Putin continues to extensively claim that
“color revolutions are a prepared scheme intended to destabilize a society.”36 And he warned
against attempt to destabilize the political system by “any unlawful methods of struggle”.37 As
with the failures of the ‘color revolutions’ before them, the prevailing negative connotations
from the revolts in the Arab world clearly play into the hands of the ruling elites.
The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and subsequent events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria
have resonated in Russia as well, where the ruling elites responded with the assertions that
the revolts in the Arab world were ignited by “outside forces” that were also aiming to topple
the Russian regime. In the words of Medvedev: “Let’s face the truth. They have been preparing
such a scenario for us, and now they will try even harder to implement it. But in any case this
scenario will not be possible”.38 Putin claims that as a result of the revolts in Libya and Egypt,
the rise of the Islamists could destabilize the situation in the Caucasus. Thus, the authorities
are aiming to convince the public that the consequences of the revolts in the Arab world could
lead to chaos, instability and rise of extremism, not an opening for a democratic and
progressive development.
Putin’s annual phone-in with the Russian public, December 15, 2011, available at:
http://premier.gov.ru/events/news/17409/
37 Putin, “Poslanie Federal’nomu Sobraniu Rossiskoi Federatsii”, April 25, 2005 at www.kremlin.ru
38 cited in Nabi Abdullaev, “Kremlin Sees Peril in Arab Unrest,” the Moscow Times, February 24,2011
36
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International environment after 2008 global financial crisis and its impact on Russia
The ongoing global financial turmoil is the gravest economic crisis since the 1930s that
is having an imprint on the global political, social and economic order. “The economic crisis
has hit every country in the world. Even such nearly-autarkic economies as North Korea and
Burma are not untouched.”(Hanson 2009:23) There are substantial decreases in international
trade, increases in unemployment and volatile price fluctuations. As a result, countries began
to grapple with higher taxes and severe reductions in public goods and services leading to a
widespread public disillusionment and mistrust of political leaderships of their countries.
Governments across the world and primarily in the West have shifted their attention to
addressing immediate domestic socio-economic consequences while the deepening austerity
is generating people’s dissatisfaction with their governments, already causing widespread
social unrest throughout the Europe continent. A close observer notes: “Back when George W.
Bush was president, his “freedom agenda” was about democratic elections and ending oneparty rule in the developing world. Now the no. 1 issue has become freedom from crippling
debt and restoring fiscal balance in the developed world…in coming years the ability to
manage debt may be the best indicator of where global power resides.”39 As the West stays
focused on the domestic consequences of global economic turmoil, external pressure for
democracy has weakened in many parts of the world, leading some to argue that its ‘soft
power’ is becoming increasingly shattered (Judah, et.al. 2011: 57).
The coming of Putin to power had coincided with a dramatic increase in world energy
prices, approaching $100 a barrel. Economists generally agree that the effect of rising
commodity prices on Russia’s economic growth is extremely large. McFaul and Stoner-Weiss
(2008) argue that increased energy revenues allowed for the return to autocracy, which in
turn has negatively influenced economy, producing more corruption and less secure property
rights.
The Kremlin used the state oil funds to distribute patronage-based largesse, thereupon
generating democracy-weakening rentier dynamics. Thus resource wealth has contributed
greatly to the survival of autocracy. To a large measure, the Russian economic future will
continue to be determined by the world oil price, and the higher the oil price means there will
be much less incentive for the Russian government to undertake reforms.
The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011 and the
39
Daniel Gross, “The New Freedom”, NEWSWEEK Special Edition, Issues 2011, December 2010/February 2011
90
continuingly unsettling situation in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, have both
brought into a light concerns related to the reliability of energy supply. The Fukushima
accident has led to countries abandoning their plans for nuclear growth and phasing out
nuclear plants altogether.
Meanwhile the global demand for energy will continue ‘to grow strongly, increasing by
one-third from 2010 to 2035, according to International Energy Agency (IEA). Moreover, as
forecasted by the IEA, “the majority of Russia’s oil and gas exports continue to go westwards
to traditional markets in Europe, but a shift towards Asia markets gathers momentum. Russia
gains greater diversity of export revenues as a result: the share of China in Russia’s total
fossil-fuel export earnings rises from 2% in 2010 to 20% in 2035, while the share of the EU
falls from 61% to 48%”.40 These forecasts underpin a fact that Russia stands to play a major
role in the global energy market in the coming decades.
In 2012 Iran nuclear issue will increasingly become a central international issue as the
West has taken an even harsher stance towards Iran’s alleged plans to expand enrichment
activities at an underground facility near Qom. Should the US choose to be drawn into military
action with Iran, while remaining a possibility, would cause global oil prices to skyrocket.
At the same time, Western analysts do not essentially concur on the forecasts about
energy prices in 2012 and beyond. Goldman Sachs claims that energy prices may rise by 15%
in 2012 and continue to rise in 2013, whereas Morgan Stanley claims that price rise is unlikely
in energy sector in the coming years41. Most remain assured that the energy price will
ultimately depend on whether or not the world economy manages to avoid recession in the
coming years.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the energy sphere, Morgan Stanley claims that
Russia’s economy will grow by 5.0% in 2012 and will be the only country that will post faster
growth in comparison to 2011 due largely to a rise in government spending and private
investment ahead of the March 2012 elections.42 Russia’s economic position may be further
strengthened by the fact that it has recently been accepted as a member of World Trade
Organization (WTO), after nearly two decades of prolonged negotiations. According to
observers, joining the organization will lead to increase by one percent of GDP per year of
IEA World Energy Outlook 2011, executive summary, available at: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/
Goldman Sachs, Outlook 2012, http://www2.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/global-economicoutlook/outlook-2012/index.html; Morgan Stanley, Global Economic Forum, 2012 outlook,
http://www.morganstanley.com/views/gef/archive/2011/20111215-Thu.html#anchor99298874-2748-11e1816a-772a53a242ce
42 http://www.morganstanley.com/views/gef/
40
41
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Russian economy43. Although observers remain uncertain and ambivalent about the exact
impact of the WTO accession on the Russian economy, it is clear that becoming a member of
WTO presents Kremlin with more confidence to continue focusing primarily on economic side of
development and modernization agenda, paying less attention to political reforms.
This is the way of an ‘open authoritarian’ regime, which according to Barma, et.al., as
discussed in Chapter 2, is proving relatively successful in prolonging its rule in an era of
globalization by selectively engaging with the outside world. It is the very ‘openness’ of the
modern authoritarian countries internationally and the current global context itself that lead
to the very sustainability of such regimes.
The table below presents a simplified way to see internal and external factors of
authoritarian regimes endurance in Russia based on the findings of the above – presented
literature.
Authoritarian regime in Russia: sources of durability
INTERNAL
EXTERNAL
Effectiveness of ‘power vertical’ reliant on The post-Cold War period- Russia’s low
coercive organizations
level of linkage to the West
Putin’s high public approval ratings Russia’s strategic important – low Western
(2000-2010)
democratizing pressure
Economic growth fueled largely by energy The impact of the ‘color revolutions and
revenues; society enjoying relative the ‘Arab Spring’ on Russian ruling
economic prosperity
regime’s campaign to insulate itself from
outside influence
Excessive role of the government in the
economy and business
United Russia party used as the ‘party of 2008 global financial crisis has led to
Western preoccupation with domestic
power’
socio-economic needs – weakened
external pressure for democracy
Sovereign democracy” rhetoric; ‘political
technology’ used to discredit and weaken
regime opponents and manipulate public
opinion, including in the ‘virtual’ realm
43
Global energy outlook: growing demand
and Russia’s position as a major player in
the global energy market;
Reliability of energy supply questioned as
a consequence of the 2011 disaster at the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
and the unstable situation in the Middle
Euronews, “WTO gains and losses for Russia”, December 16, 2011
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East and North Africa
Public
allowed
autonomy
a
degree
of
social Russia’s 2012 accession to WTO – as a
result less attention is expected to be paid
to political reforms by the ruling elite
Majority of Russians feel freer today than The Iran nuclear issue – a possibility of
sharp rise in global oil prices
during the Soviet times
Public do not endorse any alternative to
the current regime; lack of an effective
and united opposition
Conclusion
In this chapter we have seen the rapidly changing nature of Russia’s domestic political,
social and economic context. Since the fall of communism the country has undergone a
tremendous transformation of its political, social and economic system. Under Eltsin’s
presidency, the country was politically disorganized and the economy was in shambles.
Overall there was a widespread sense of insecurity and uncertainty prevalent in Russia at that
time. In no small measure Putin’s coming to power at the end 1990s has influenced the
regime’s change in an increasingly authoritarian direction. The need for stability to provide an
order to the chaotic early 1990s has given birth to a centralized state apparatus, little
accountable to the public and based on close control of Putin and a narrow circle of ruling
elite.
A widespread analysis of the political system of Russia among close observers is
ultimately focused on Vladimir Putin as he is identified closely with the current regime, as a
testament to that in the last several years a number of books have emerged with “Putin’s
Russia” as a title (Shevtsova, 2005; Jack, 2005; Politkovskaya, 2007; Sakwa, 2008; Wegren and
Herspring, 2010). This study has argued that Putin remains one of the most important political
figures, who makes decisions within a limited circle of a ruling group that includes former
President Medvedev and other players from the security, law enforcement and business
community.
Understanding what constitutes the Putin regime is crucial for comprehending what
kind of transformation the Russian political system has been faced with. The main
characteristics of the Putin regime include a creation of an interventionist and regulatory
central state apparatus, modernization of the Russian economy through trade and economic
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cooperation, largely based on increasing oil prices. These stand to have a lasting impact on the
future of the country’s political system.
The 2011 Duma elections have shown to have little impact on Putin’s bit for presidency
that he has indeed won, under however fraudulent electoral conditions. It was widely
forecasted that should Putin become once again Russia’s president, it then would lead to 12
years of political stagnation, reminiscent of Brezhnev44 era, with corruption remaining
rampant and repression prolonged (see for example Aslund 2011). Given the present
conditions, this study argues that Russia will remain steadfast authoritarian at least in the
medium term future.
This is the domestic context in which we should view Russia’s international behavior.
Chapter 3 addressed the theoretical account of the relationship between regime type and
foreign policy of states in order to discern whether or not authoritarian states act differently
internationally in comparison with their democratic counterparts. The next chapter will
attempt to take further the relevant theoretical findings and apply them to the case study on
Russia.
The case of Russia’s international behavior is quite pertinent because in the past
several years it has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention: analysts began to note
Russia’s resurgence on the world stage and emphasis has particularly been placed on its
domestic political setting as it has become increasingly centralized, while at the same time its
global resurgence has become a significant feature of international relations. The chapter that
follows will take seriously the notion that domestic factors increasingly shape Russian behavior
in the international arena and will examine this proposition in-depth.
Leonid Brezhnev – presided over the former Soviet Union from 1962 until his death in 1982; Brezhnev’s
eighteen year term in office were widely called ‘Brezhnev stagnation, or era of stagnation’ as it was marked by
serious economic, political and social problems.
44
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Chapter 5. Russia’s ‘domestic’ foreign policy
The previous chapter outlined Russia’s domestic socio-political and economic setting,
within which we should view its international behavior. We have learned that the Russian
regime has since the early 1990’s increasingly become authoritarian due to a number of
crucial domestic and international factors. Chapter 5 will follow the theoretical scheme of
Chapter 3 by questioning how being an authoritarian regime domestically impacts on Russia’s
foreign policy behavior and international system in general? Posing such a question
encompasses a wide sphere of engagement, well beyond military actions, to examine how
institutional structure of the state impacts on the international decisions of its ruling elites. In
Chapter 3, it was argued that regime type and domestic context in general do indeed have an
influence on state’ international behavior and therefore the study of international relations
should incorporate a much more thorough analysis of the relationship between foreign policy
and internal dynamics of states.
This study works essentially within the framework of modified realism that takes into
account the domestic factors in consideration of international behavior of states as
exemplified in particular in the work of Donaldson and Nogee (2009). Modified realism
highlights the balance of power and the importance of national interest and examines indepth factors that influence foreign policy of Russia, both internal and external.
Classical realism per se is insufficient in explaining Russia’s foreign policy. Realism lays
emphases on the historical patterns in Russia’s foreign policy and argues that preservation
and enhancement of power is Russia’s national interest that affects its international behavior.
However, realism falls short of grasping fully changes in foreign policy and the scope an
origins of those changes, having placed overwhelming emphasis on power and structure of
international system. Yet, domestic factors serve as significant source of foreign policy
behavior of states and therefore must be part of any account of Russia’s foreign policy. The
study outlines and explores the major domestic factors that directly impact on Russia’s
international behavior so as to demonstrate that Russia’s foreign policy has strong roots in
domestic forces.
The present chapter addresses the foreign policy course of Russia under the Putin
regime. The overarching aim is to provide both a description and an explanation of the foreign
policy of Russia through the prism of its domestic political setting, taking the last 20 years of
an independent Russian Federation more broadly as the time frame of analysis. How does the
foreign agenda mirror the domestic agenda? Russia’s foreign policy was and remains ‘domestic’
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in a sense that it is substantially subordinated to the goals of domestic agenda of consolidating
the state and undertaking predominately economic reforms.
As shown in Chapter 4, leadership personality plays a quite significant role in the
context of any discourse on Russia’s current political system. The study attributed much of
change in Russia’s political setting to Putin’s coming to power in 2000 and his significant role
in bringing about a system of governance based on ‘vertical of power’. At the same time, it was
stressed that the Putin regime is a system of governance based on the cohesion and consent of
an elite group formed around Putin that has established and maintains a centralized authority
based on institutions through which the rule is administered.
Throughout much of the Russian history, political leadership has played an important
role in influencing the content of foreign policy of the country. Traditionally, the executive has
overwhelmingly dominated foreign policy making in Russia with highly restricted roles for
parliament and political parties (Checkel 1995). With the passage of the 1993 Constitution of
Russian Federation, the president of Russia was endowed with a dominating role in the policy
process, including in the external domain. But as will be argued in this study, the foreign
policy making domain in Russia like in the domestic domain is a product of more than simply
incumbent leader’s preferences and decisions. Political leadership is one of the factors that
influence Russia foreign policy course. Below is the list of major domestic drivers affecting
Russia’s international behavior.
Major domestic drivers of Russia’s foreign policy:
a. The role of Putin’s leadership
Putin has indeed set forth major directions of Russian foreign policy and has taken an
active involvement in a wide range of foreign-policy activities – indeed the first Russian leader
to do so. This has prompted one of the closest observers of Russia to assert that ‘the foreign
policy of the Putin era is indeed Putin’s own foreign policy’ (Rumer 2007: 10). Undoubtedly,
Putin’s coming to power has had a lasting impact on the domestic and foreign affairs of Russia.
Putin is pragmatic in his foreign policy behavior much as he is on the domestic front.
He is a complex figure with a preference for measured, gradual, evolutionary change, steady,
well-planned actions, being highly inspired by Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist prime minister
under the last czar, Nicholas II. Echoing Stolypin’s famous reprimand to Duma deputies in
1907: “You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia”, Putin
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claims, “We do not need great upheavals. We need a great Russia” (Hill and Gaddy 2012).
Putin’s political ideas stems from his re-interpretation of history and a fusion of czarist and
Soviet ideas.
Balancing against the West, and the US in particular, was not a part of his distinctive
vision of Russia’s national interest that represented Russia as a great power. In his view,
Russia must join the community of Western states as an independent and autonomous
‘normal’ power (Motyl, Ruble and Shevtsova 2003), to some extent echoing Kosyrev’s ideas
presented above. Putin has recognized that Russia has no future except a close economic
relationship with the West, particularly with the European Union. In addition, following
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, Putin has actively cooperated in the US-led
war on terror, which further strengthened a perception of his pro-Western position that
lasted up to the late 2002.
Two days before Yeltsin resigned as Russia’s president and handed over power to
Putin, an important document “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium” emerged on the official
website of the Russian government. In this document Putin essentially outlined his agenda of
consolidating the Russian state. He emphasized that the ‘Russian idea’ comprised unique
Russian values such as patriotism, collectivism and solidarity, derzhavnost’ (great power
status) and gosudarstvennichestvo (the precedence of state above everything) 45 Putin is said
to be ‘obsessed with unity and avoiding the dangers of splintering and fracturing in politics’
(Hill and Gaddy 2012).
Lo (2003) and Trenin (2002) and Lo (2003) emphasize in particular that Putin has
strong domestic coalition building skills, and stress his ability to appease many interests and
balance competing factions within the government, while remaining neural and not aligning
too closely with any particular group. The elite of Russia is not a genuinely homogeneous
group and there prevail various strands of opinion. The elite serve the primary constituents of
an incumbent leader, and their preferences inevitably must be take into account, otherwise a
leader risks being deposed. In case of Russia, there is a strong dynamic of elite-leader
relationship that helps explain a course of foreign policy decision-making.
b. Consolidation of centralized state rule
The foremost object of the Putin regime was an improvement and consolidation of the
Russian state and the kind of policy he pursued domestically had a strong impact on the
45
Vladimir Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletiy,” Nezavisiamay Gazeta, December 30, 1999
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foreign policy course. Referring to Putin’s authority, Chambers (2010:125) submits that “the
strategy pursued internally fuels the strategy pursued internationally, and the strategy
pursued internationally acts as legitimation for the strategy pursued internally”. The domestic
agenda defined by Putin has considerably correlated with his foreign policy one. According to
Shevtsova (2010), a vicious cycle was created, in which the Russian centralized state sought
to be recognized as a great power by the international community, which in turn fostered
even further centralization of power at home.
Troitskiy (2006) argues that “to the greatest extent ever, Russian foreign policy now
begins at home”, that the sources of Russia’s foreign policy have become increasingly
domestic in the course of a decade while during the early 1990s and beginning of the decade
it was more receptive to external factors, due primarily to Eltsin’s attempts to model Russia to
Western liberal democracy and dependence on foreign financial aid.
During the Yeltsin presidency, foreign policy was defined and implemented in a
decentralized and fragmented way with a number of various groups having an impact. At that
time Kremlin was largely unable to control and coordinate the activities of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs (MFA), Defense Ministry, the Security Council, the regional governors, all of
whom had their own foreign policy agendas.
This state of affairs contrasts starkly with the Putin era, when foreign policy became
centrally coordinated, yet still reflecting the interests of a narrow base of power structures
and state corporations, which were closely interlinked through the partial re-nationalization
of the resource sector and introduction of a strong power vertical (discussed at length in
Chapter 4).
As a part of his objective to strengthen of the power vertical, Putin has sought
centralization of foreign policy making in the Kremlin, concentrating much of it in the
presidential administration. The MFA, the Security Council, the Parliament, regional leaders
are said to have played a peripheral role in foreign policy making, greatly circumscribed
under Putin’s presidency. At the same time, the biggest state-own firms, such as energy
companies – Gasprom and oil pipeline operator Transneft – and the security services along
with the military have remained quite influential.
Russia’s engagement in the 2008 war with Georgia stands to reinforce the prevailing
assumption that the foreign policy decision-making in Russia is highly centralized with
Vladimir Putin, serving as a prime minister at the time of the war, being largely
unconstrained, i.e. not facing a powerful domestic audience and ‘monopolizing’ foreign policy
decision making, in deciding whether or not to engage in conflict. This reinforces Weeks
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(2011) theoretical arguments on conflict initiation in autocracies presented in Chapter 3. “To
a world that had grown used to seeing Russia as a dysfunctional shell, the invasion of Georgia
was a stunning announcement that Russia had again become a force to be reckoned with”
(Mankoff 2009: 1).
A strong state is deemed to be crucial in addressing state-defined security threats, such
as Islamic extremism. A model of statism built at home, is reflected externally with
championing of a strong sovereign state. On the other hand, theoretically speaking, a more
democratized political system in Russia would have allowed general public’s natural
preference for a foreign policy directed at addressing socio-economic oriented instead of a
course directed at active external role elsewhere. Although in case of Russia, continuous and
sustained domestic support for the Putin regime’s foreign policy course has been extensively
emphasized by observers. Trenin (2006) claims that “the Russian political system rests on the
acquiescence of the governed”. Rumer (2007, Ch3) stresses that “Putin’s foreign policy, his
vision of Russian interests abroad and his choice of means to advance those interests have
enjoyed the broad and consistent support of his constituents”.
c. Public support of foreign policy course of the state
Nationwide surveys reveal a steady trend of popular support for Kremlin’s foreign
policy decision-making choices among the average Russian. The majority of Russian public
have expressed support for the policy of balancing against the US even if the majority have a
positive attitude towards the latter46; viewing NATO as a constant threat to Russia and
supporting the view that Russia should form counterbalancing alliances or stand as a single
bloc against NATO47; viewing Georgia’s hypothetical membership in NATO as a threat to
Russia48. In the latest opinion poll data regarding the foreign policy course of Russia, the
respondents stand for a closer cooperation with the countries of the Commonwealth of
Independent States and Western Europe, at the same time support a policy of keeping a
distance in relation with the US, which 76% of those polled regard as an “aggressor that aims
to take under its control all countries of the world”, as opposed to 7% viewing the US as a
Levada Center, Nationwide Survey, April 2008,
http://www.russiavotes.org/security/security_usa_nato.php#541
47 Levada Center, Nationwide Survey, February-March 2009,
http://www.russiavotes.org/security/security_usa_nato.php#541
48 Levada Center, Nationwide Survey, September 2008; January-February 2010,
http://www.russiavotes.org/security/security_usa_nato.php#541
46
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“guarantor of peace, democracy and order”.49 Thus, it appears that the major pillars of Putin’s
foreign policy remain in line with majority sentiment in Russia.
d. Economic growth fueled by high-energy revenues, coupled with increased state-control
share of the economy.
Russia has faced a rather rapid economic recovery, roughly encompassing the 19982008 period, with an average annual growth rate of 7 percent, putting Russia to tenth place
among the world’s largest economies, which has laid the foundation for a more confident and
resurgent foreign policy course. Its domestic revival and strong economic growth allowed
Russia to repay its external debt and built vast foreign currency reserves. So that energyfueled economic growth allowed primarily for freedom from dependence on foreign creditors,
stimulated higher budgetary expenditures on military among other measures. Notably, “Putin
paid off Russia’s entire remaining debt to the IMF more than 3 years ahead of schedule in
2005 and to the Paris Club in 2006” (Gaddy 2007). As a result, West’s bargaining position visà-vis Russia decreased substantially as Russia’s political leadership has sought a better
negotiating position for Russia in order to carry through with an independent foreign policy
course. By 2007 Russia’s budget expenditures on foreign policy increased dramatically.
Compared to 1996, spending on external relations had almost doubled (Safranchuk 2007).
Throughout his terms in office, Putin has stood for Russia’s global economic
integration and actively sought to make Russia attractive to foreign investors. Putin has
remained strongly committed to the principles of the market economy and private enterprise,
seeking to reconcile private ownership with the need for central state order.
Under Medvedev’s presidency that has begun in 2008, the broad outlines of Putin’s
approach to international affairs have endured. Former President Medvedev has put forward
a new paradigm of an improved investment climate and a more open and dynamic Russia.
Improving Russia’s economy involves opening to innovations and investments from the West,
which has already involved resetting relations with Washington and expanding cooperation
with the EU. Global integration via the recent entry into the WTO has been the prime objective
for the Russian leadership.
Levada Center, Press-vipusk, Vneshnaya politica Rossii, otnoshenie k drugim stranam, 21 February, 2012,
http://www.levada.ru/21-02-2012/vneshnyaya-politika-rossii-otnoshenie-k-drugim-stranam
49
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e. The great power ambitions of the ruling elite
In Putin’s second term as president (2004-2008), Russia’s foreign policy became much
more assertive, as evident in Putin’s infamous speech at the Munich Conference on Security
Policy in February 2007. Putin strongly criticized the US ‘unilateralism in world politics. He
accused the US of “disdain for the basic principles of international law” and having
“overstepped its national borders in…the economic, political, cultural and educational policies
it imposes on other nations.”50 Putin’s Munich speech was further refined in the Russian
foreign ministry report “A Review of the Russian Federation’s foreign policy” of 2007, which
outlined justifications for Russia’s more active role in shaping international relations,
emphasizing the notions of multipolarity based on “a more equitable distribution of resources
for influence and economic growth”, as contrarily to the notion of unilateralism and
disrespect of international law by any one global power.51
The great-power ambitions of Kremlin’s elites portray Russia as an assertive
autonomous international actor in world affairs, as one of the poles in the twenty-first century
multipolar international system, based strongly on the notion of sovereignty and
noninterference, in which there exist alternative political models of development that differ
from Western liberal democracy model.
There is a strong sense of the uniqueness of Russian national identity among the rulers
and ruled alike that fuels its special place in the world. The same holds true for the Russian
scholarly community, among which even liberals stress Russia’s special position as an
independent center of power in the world (see for example Lukin 2002, Pushkov 2002). Thus,
while seeking to secure its national and commercial interests abroad, in its relations with
other countries, the Russian political leadership has sought to promote, at times intentionally,
an idea of a strong centralized state, impervious to outside interference in its domestic affairs.
In turn, prompting some Western scholars (see for example Sakwa 2008) to argue that
Russia’s approach to international relations was becoming increasingly neo-realist, based on
the old-fashioned notion of power balancing.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia faced the times of internal decline,
protracted turmoil and withdrawal from the international arena, leading some to claim that
Russia was becoming ‘less and less an actor in world affairs, while running the risk of
becoming an object of competition among more advanced and dynamic powers’ (Graham
50
51
Vladimir Putin, “Speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy”, February 10, 2007, www.kremlin.ru
“Obzor vneshnei politiki Rossiskoi federatsii”, March 27,2007, www.mid.ru
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1999).
The basic principles of the Russian foreign policy throughout much of the 1990’s were
a combination of a number of contending ideas and visions of how Russia should respond to
its newly formed independent nationhood. There were ‘liberal Westernizing’ ideas promoted
by the first Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev (1990-1996), who argued shortly after
the break-up of the USSR that Russia would not ‘cease to be a great power’, it would however
be a ‘normal’ great power, which would pursue the kind of national interests that would be
‘understandable to democratic countries’ (Kozyrev 1992:10). At the same time Kozyrev has
sought to promote a new broadly inclusive security arrangement in Europe, or by
strengthening the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The Russian
authorities were convinced that the NATO after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact would
cease to exist and took a passive stance towards it.
Kozyrev’s ideas were highly supported by President Yeltsin and Deputy Prime Minister
Egor Gaidar. Like Gorbachev, Eltsin was from the Westernist tradition in foreign policy
thinking in Russia, promoting the idea that Russia should emulate the West for it is part of
Europe, with which it shares common values and therefore should develop in the same
manner as the West. The idea was to turn Russia into a modern state with socio-political and
economic system as one found in the advanced Western countries in a rather short time span.
On the foreign policy front, the objective was to “create a nonthreatening external
environment that would be most conducive to domestic economic and political
development…producing a foreign policy of accommodation, retrenchment, and risk
avoidance” (Donaldson and Nogee 2009:109). It was a radical shift away from a commitment
to ideological struggle and power balancing against the West. Yeltsin had tuned to prodemocracy and pro-Western rhetoric, seeking to join the G-7, the World Trade Organization,
the European Union (EU) and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
However such liberal ideas were quickly swept away by a quite strong degree of
internal criticism and a wide political debate. Contrary to the ‘liberal Westernizing’ ideas,
came the contending views, expressing the idea of Russia being distinct from the West, an
Eurasian state with a significant role of serving as a bridge between East and West. At the
same time, more attention were to be focused on the ‘Near Abroad’ (blizhnee zarubejie) and a
special rule that Russia plays in the region by becoming its integrator and a defender of some
25 million ethnic Russians residing in the states of the former Soviet space. This so-called
‘pragmatic nationalist’ or ‘Eurasianist’ viewpoint has become quite influential among a
number of government and academic institutions, primarily promoted by presidential
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advisors Sergei Stankevich and Andranik Migranian. Stankevich argued that Russia has a
special mission “to initiate and maintain a multilateral dialogue of cultures, civilizations and
states. Russia the conciliator, Russia the unifier, Russia the harmonizer”.52 Migranian has even
more staunchly stressed that “Russia should declare to the world that the entire geopolitical
space of the former USSR is a space of its vital interests”.53
Prevalent at that time were also ‘fundamentalist nationalist’ ideas, expressing
viewpoints of communists and extreme nationalists. The ‘fundamentalist’ were openly antiWestern, promoting the idea of restoring the strong, and imperialist Russia to bring back its
lost territories in the other former Soviet states, by the use of force if necessary. Strong
contenders of this view were Vladimir Zhirinovski, the leader of neofascist party and Genadii
Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party.
Under Russia’s second foreign minister Evgenii Primakov (1996-1998), who had
replaced Kozyrev, the vision of Russia as a great power came as central in Russia’s foreign
policy aspirations. Primakov represented the liberal Statist school of Russian foreign policy
thinking that promoted the notion of a strong state at home and abroad54.
At the same time, the Russian authorities have begun to increasingly voice their
opposition to much in the West’s foreign policy, most markedly NATO’s eastward expansion,
and its military intervention in the Balkans. It was indeed the NATO 1999 war against
Yugoslavia that marked the departure from pro-Western views in the Kremlin altogether and
the alliance was from that point in time seen as a threat. At the same time, the 2000 versions
of the National Security Concept, the Military Doctrine and Foreign Policy Concept of Russia
displayed a “more ‘muscular’ approach to the use of force and a more pessimistic view of
international relations” (Trenin 2007).
The foreign policy discourse in Russia is wrought with a fundamental tension between
harnessing fully the power of market economy and making Russia a modern capitalist country
and on the other hand, there is a deep-seated desire for global influence along the lines of
traditional notions of power politics.
With regards to the latter, Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 clearly demonstrated
Russia’s determination and confidence to carry out a large-scale military assault on a
neighboring country in spite of a worldwide condemnation and to the gross detriment to its
relation with the West. At the end of the Putin’s second term in office, Russia’s relations with
Sergei Stankevich, “A power in Search of Itself”, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 28, 1992
Andranik Migranian, “Real and Illusory Guidelines in Foreign Policy”, Rossiiskaia Gazeta, August 4, 1992
54 More on the distinction between Russia’s foreign policy schools of thought see Tsygankov (2006, Chapter 1)
52
53
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the West have been marked by low level of trust and mutual understanding while the quest
on the part of the Russian leadership to be taken seriously in the world affairs has become
firmly an enduring feature of its international behavior. So that “Russia does not set itself up
as an alternative to the West; but it does claim autonomy…While the West wants Russia to be
a junior partner, Russia insists that it is a separate power in its own right” (Sakwa 2008:246)
The Kremlin’s most recent foreign-policy doctrine outlines the plans to establish a
world in which Russia will be ‘mutually dependent’ on other big powers with the EU and US as
the most desirable partners (McDermott, 2010). It has been noted in particular that Russia is
on its course of foreign policy adjustment towards a greater engagement with the West, yet at
the same time, self-assertiveness and self-confidence of Russia’s ruling elites remains intact
(Secrieru, 2009).
The foreign policy moves under the Putin regime that were propelled by a centralized
and stronger authority in Russia have been extensively described as being aggressive: gas cutoffs and pressure on Ukraine, cyber-attacks on Estonia, constant anti-American rhetoric, use
of military force in Georgia, a danger of a ‘new arms race’. So that many scholars in the West
began to speak of the revival of the Cold War (see for example Brzezinski 2004; Satter 2007;
Hoagland 2007; Lucas 2008). On the other hand, Russian officials and scholars have tended to
be more assured that Russia’s newly active foreign policy behavior is beneficial for Russia and
for the world (see for example Ivanov 2003; Primakov 2006; Degoev 2006; Baluyevsky 2003).
Scholars such as Tsygankov (2009) posit that Western scholars and policy analysts
have often misinterpreted the intentions and policies of Russia. Russia’s relations with the
West define much of Russia’s foreign policy and national interest. He argues that Russia’s
power maximization ventures have come as a result of the inability or reluctance on the part
of the West to engage Russia multilaterally.
According to Tsygankov, in a historical perspective, from Alexander I’s Holy Alliance,
through the Bolsheviks’ strong support for a collective security system in Europe to prevent
the rise of fascism, the Soviet global security initiatives, Gorbachev’s ‘common European
home’ idea, Kozyrev’s calls to develop ‘natural partnership’ with Western countries, to Putin’s
policy of assertiveness, there are indications that Russia, while searching to strengthen its
material capabilities, at the same time has sought to combine these with ideas of global
governance. The recent international assertiveness of Russia is one of many instances when
“it has strived to bridge principles of multilateral decision-making with those of multipolar
balance of power” (p.51).
Former Russian President Medvedev put forward some concrete proposals about
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NATO and Russia sharing responsibility for security in Europe, particularly information
sharing and jointly managing defense systems. In his speech in Berlin in 2008, Medvedev
called for a new comprehensive security architecture that would encompass broader security
alliances, including a new European security treaty in order to upgrade Cold War-era security
arrangements55. In the words of Dmitry Medvedev, the most important consequence of the
war in Georgia is that on August 8, 2008 a previous security architecture seized to exist.
Russia is calling on a creation of a new architecture based on multipolarity that does not allow
any one country to dominate. According to a number of scholars, these new proposals have
epitomized Russia’s latest efforts to reassert itself on the world stage, as a ‘joiner’ that seeks
to normalize its relations with the world (Goldgeier and McFaul 2004, Sakwa 2008).
The idea that Russia’s foreign policy became more assertive was strongly reinforced by
August 2008 event that culminated in Russia’s military invasion of Georgia. In general, peace
is closely linked to those norms and institutions that are widely associated with democracies.
From chapter 3 we have learned that authoritarian states are on the whole less constrained
internally than are democracies and thus are more likely to engage in conflict.
Russia’s basic principle of the world politics largely rests on traditional Westphalian
notion of sovereignty, as juxtaposed to ‘liberal interventionist’ notion predominant in the
West. So that “Russian foreign policy discussions tend to focus on the need to make the world
more stable rather than on the development of a universal model of government.” (Bordachev
2009:65)
The West’s approach of using preventive force around the world is regarded by
Kremlin as a strategic threat to Russia. NATO’s active engagement with other former Soviet
Union countries around Russia, the US unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and the
planned deployment of American ballistic missile defence (BMD) components to the Czech
Republic and Poland have remained the main points of contention between Russia and the
West.
Stratfor (2012) describes current US-Russia relations as ‘incredibly tense’, with the
central point of contention being the US BMD plans. The US BMD systems are scheduled to
become operational in Romania in 2015 and in Poland in 2018. The US claims that the
systems are intended to counter the rising threat from Iran. For Russia, “BMD means a
physical US military presence in the region, showing Washington’s security commitment to
Central Europe against a strengthening Russia.” As a response, Kremlin offered to join
“Russia Unveils Proposal For European Security Treaty”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 8,2009,
http://www.rfrl.org/content/Russia_Unveils_Proposal_For_European_Security_Treaty/1891161.html
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together its BMD system with NATO’s defense system, a proposal that was rejected by
Washington, aggravating further Russia’s suspicions of the US factual intentions and
triggering a number of countermeasures on the part of Russia. Kremlin has threatened to cut
off the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the only one large supply network, through
which shipments of fuel and supplies for the NATO-led war effort (more than 130,000 US and
allied troops) in Afghanistan takes place.
f. The role of security and military elite
Particularly during Putin’s second term in office (2004-2008), there was a growing
number of siloviki, members of various internal security forces of the former KGB, working in
the MFA, thus raising the influence of power structures on foreign policy decision-making
(Mankoff 2009, Chapter 2). A substantial number of appointments of those with KGB
background has lend to a conviction by a number of scholars that the foreign policy making
would be influenced by a certain kind of expertise and that precisely this administrative factor
might explain the course of the foreign policy of greater assertiveness (see for example Petrov
2002, Kryshtanovska and White 2003). Indeed this factor stands as a contributing element of
the course of foreign policy adjustments.
There is in place a substantial degree of influence of post-Soviet security and military
elites, who proclaim Russia as a counterbalancing power against the US hegemony and inflate
the prevalence of foreign threats. As a result there is constant emphasis on military might. In
2007, a seven-year $200 billion rearmament plan was adopted, including the acquisition of a
new generation of missiles, planes and aircraft-carriers (Sakwa 2008: 251). The government
has monopolized the Military Industrial Complex sector through merger of Rosvooruzhenie
and Promexport into Rosoboronexport to control export of military equipment to developing
countries. The Russian ruling authorities are clearly taking preventing steps to face perceived
internal and external threats to its order and stability. Putin has made large-scale military
modernization one of his top priorities as part of this vision of national security policy,
promising to add in the next 10 years 400 intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic
missiles, including eight ballistic missile submarines, with plans to increase the percentage of
contracted servicemen up to 70% in the next five years’ time (Trenin 2012) There was a
rising trend in the amount of resources that the military, security and state enforcement
agencies have been receiving:
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Militarization of the State Budget of Russian Federation
State budget expenditures,
annually, in %
2009
2011
2014
National defense
12.3
13.9
18.8
National security and law
enforcement
10.4
11.3
14.2
National economy
17.1
16.2
11.3
Housing and communal
1.6
2.1
0.5
Education
4.3
5.1
3.4
Cultural sphere
1.2
0.8
0.6
Healthcare
3.6
4.6
3.2
37.2
5.2
3.4
Interbudgetary transfers
regions and municipalities
to
Source: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12 December 2011, according to the data provided by the Ministry of
Finance of Russian Federation, www.ng.ru/economics/2011-12-30/4_militarizaciya.html
The principle domestic drivers of Russia’s foreign policy presented above come to
project a significant enough influence on the course of Russia’s international behavior. By
stressing the role of domestic factors in the making of foreign policy, this study does not imply
that internal factors are the only variable influencing all of Russia’s foreign policy aims and
capabilities. The international system’s fundamental components shifted considerably in the
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last few years and a number of critical international factors stand to play a significant role in
foreign policymaking of Russia.
In the early 21-century, the US remains the world’s sole military might. However, its
ability to claim global leadership has been seriously shattered by the loss of moral authority
following the disaster of Iraq, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The US military forces have
withdrawn from Iraq, leading to a shift in the region with Iran potentially asserting more
influence there. The ensuing war in Afghanistan remains complicated and NATO casualties are
on the rise. Russian policymakers and scholars have pointed to what they perceive to be the
US’s long drawn out preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 global
war on terror, which seemingly puts limits on the US geopolitical ambitions.56 Indeed the
situation in Afghanistan, Iran nuclear issue, the war on terrorism, and internal economic state
of affairs will remain priority on Washington’s domestic and foreign agenda for a foreseeable
future.
Moreover, with the global recession in place, the European Union’s position as a global
player has been considerably shattered, as the eurozone crisis will continue well into 2012.
The global financial crisis has demonstrated the weakness of the neo-liberal ‘Washington
consensus’ and inability on the part of the Western led international financial architecture to
regulate global finance and foster development.
As Russia seeks deeper economic integration with the rest of the world, its national
economy too is becoming quite vulnerable in the age of globalization when trade,
communication, and financial linkages create a deeper state of interdependence sufficiently
limiting national policymakers’ freedom of action. This in turn should stimulate the Russian
authorities to seek stronger economic cooperation internationally.
Scholars such as Trenin (2001) argue that Russia has no choice but to seek greater
integration with the EU and solid relations with the US in order to face regional challenges
such as China’s growing might and the instability of the Islamic south. Indeed, the course of
Russia’s foreign policy has been characterized on the one hand by a steady engagement with the
West on central issues of mutual concern, such as terrorism and economic cooperation, and on
the other hand, marked equally by a degree of tension with the West as far as its geopolitical
assertiveness is concerned. So that “nearly two decades since the fall of communism…a
satisfactory balance between integration and autonomy [in its relationship with the West] has
not yet been found” (Sakwa 2008: 242). Nowhere has this tension in relation with the West
Bogaturov, A. (2007) “Lovushki detsentralizatsii: V SShA vozvraschaetsya mysl’ o privlekatel’nosti shirokikh
koalitsii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 5 February
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been more pronounced than in case of Russia’s claim to have an advantaged position in the
region of former Soviet Union. Following the war in Georgia in 2008, President Medvedev
explicitly asserted that “Russia, like other countries of the world, has regions in which it
maintains privileged interests”.57
Russia in its ‘Near Abroad’: promoting autocracy while furthering national and commercial
interests
The ‘near abroad’ states are the non-Baltic former Soviet republics, which throughout
the 1990’s were on the periphery of Russia’s immediate foreign policy concerns. Thus,
initially the policy towards the former Soviet republics remained largely neglected. At that
time, Russia was concentrated on relations with the West instead. Gradually however the
Kremlin began to shift its attention increasingly to the ‘near abroad’.
Authoritarian rulers in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have all
received unwavering support from Russia, while it sought to further undermine democratic
practices in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. Russia has
succeed in limiting the degree of influence of external forces in much of the former Soviet
Union and has firmly become the dominant player there, amidst a substantial shift in US
foreign policy focus to the Islamic world away from Eurasia, leading a scholar to stress that
“Russia’s influence on the political systems of former Soviet republics must be considered a
fact” (Kastner 2010).
At the contemporary stage, Russia has managed to install a rather consistent politicalmilitary strategy particularly towards Central Asian countries in the view of the EU’s and
NATO’s enlargement, missile defense in Europe, and the presence of foreign military bases in
the region. The deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan, and the August 2008
Georgia war have further contributed to the resurgence of Russia in the Eurasian region. At
the same time, Gazprom’s activities in the region and Moscow’s aggressive energy
cooperation strategy have begun to turn the region into a special target of Russia’s energy,
and economic expansion. In order to exert further influence over neighbouring countries,
Putin proposed close economic integration with Belarus and Kazakhstan, elevating the
Customs Union to the Eurasian Economic Union. Growing multilateralism in Russian foreign
Dmitry Medvedev, “Interv’yu Dmitriya Medvedeva telekanalam ‘Rossiya’, Pervomu, NTV”,31 August, 2008,
http://www.kremlin.ru/appears/2008/08/31/1917_type63374type63379_205991.shtml
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policy was evident in its effort to strengthen both the regional Collective Security Treaty
Organization and Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The Russian leadership has managed to strengthen its influence in its neighboring
region through a combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power58 and export its model of managed or
‘sovereign’ democracy there as well. It is conventionally believed that Russia has no soft
power. There are however mechanisms of influence and attraction that Russia has crafted to
establish informal networks, business links, state-corporate relations, civilizational affinities
and linguistic ties. The Russian language persists as a regional lingua franca; it is the language
of commerce, employment and education for many countries in the former Soviet region.
Furthermore, populations of regional countries are attracted to the Russian popular
culture, which spreads through satellite TV; there is a growing film industry, rock music,
popular literature and the rich artistic tradition. Also, Russian consumer goods have begun to
dominate regional markets. In the course of the last several years, a vast number of
immigrants from Eurasia came to Russia in search of work. Hill (2004) claims that Russia’s
greatest contribution to the security and stability of its vulnerable southern neighbors has
been through absorbing the surplus labor of these states, providing markets for their goods,
and transferring funds in the form of remittances (rather than foreign aid).
Russia-financed NGOs and think tanks have emerged in many CIS countries. What ‘soft
power’ instruments are at the disposal of the Kremlin in order to spread its ideology? These
include media outlets, youth movements, pro-Kremlin Internet websites, expert networks,
regular conferences and publishing houses. Putin himself stands in active support of
promoting Russian language and culture, foremost in other former Soviet countries, by
forming in 2005 the “department of interregional and cultural relations with foreign countries
and the CIS” (Mereu 2005).
The ‘soft power’ machine created by the Russian state is
described as “the new face of ‘smart authoritarianism’ that speaks the language of Western
norms and is very flexible, but has very little to do with the values of democracy, Eastern- or
Western-style” (Popescu 2006:2).
Similarly to Ambrosio’s (2009) main theorizing presented throughout the previous
chapters, Jackson (2010) advances the argument that external factors that constitute indirect
diffusion and direct promotion, while having an influence on regimes to democratize, also
‘Soft power’ defined by Joseph S. Nye as the “ability to get what you want through attraction rather than
through coercion”. Nye argues that ‘soft power’ originates from three resources: “a state’s culture (in places
where it is attractive to others), its political values (where it lives up to them at home and abroad) and its foreign
policies (where they are seen as legitimate and having more authority)”.
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have an impact on maintaining and/or entrenching authoritarian form of rule. Russia as a
dominant regional power has had an impact on the strengthening of centralized rule
especially in the countries of Central Asia. The influence has taken shape in the form of
deliberate as well as unintentional actions on the part of Russia to prompt up regimes in the
neighboring states.
For instance, Moscow extended unconditional support to Uzbekistan President Islam
Karimov following the Andijon massacre, whereas the West strongly condemned the
repressive actions of the Uzbek authorities and pressed Karimov for an independent
investigation of the incident.59 The difference in external reaction to the Andijon events on the
part of Russia and the West has played well into the hands of the former. Karimov shifted his
position and sought closer military ties with Russia, permitting the stationing of a Russian
military base on in his country in exchange for substantial financial aid from Moscow, while at
the same time ordering that the US vacate its military base in the city of Manas. Thus, Russia
has gained an upper hand in the region, by its ability to cozy up to the authoritarian leaders of
Central Asia as a significant advantage over the West.
Jackson (2010) argues further that there is no ‘coherent or a deliberate agenda of
‘autocratization’ per se that would characterize Russia’s support of the neighboring regimes.
Close military and security ties of Russia with the countries of Central Asia have reinforced
these states’ coercive capabilities vis-à-vis its societies.
Russia’s political, diplomatic,
economic support mainly contributes to legitimization of current regimes particularly in
Central Asia and an encouragement of the status quo. There is also at play a strong factor that
unites authoritarian regimes, particularly in the case of Russia and its Central Asian neighbors
following the Colored revolutions of 2003-2005 period – an aggravation in a strong
perception of a threat to the stability of a regime.
Shapovalova and Zarembo (2010) argue that “Russia is not interested in bolstering a
particular type of regime within its ‘sphere of privileged interests’ as an end in itself”…the
main aim is to “establish a Russia-dependent government”.” Russia is adept at utilizing either
promotion of autocracy tactic or supporting democracy in its neighboring countries,
‘depending on what best suits its interest’. In case of its relations with Belarus, it was noted
that Russia has sought to weaken President Lukashenko’s regime during the stages of
ruptured relations between the two countries. Kremlin is said to have engaged with the
In May 2005 a bloody uprising in the city of Andijon in Uzbekistan took place and it was met with massive
retaliation by government forces, which led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians and the displacement of
thousands more. Andijon became a symbol of Uzbek repression under Karimov.
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Belarusian opposition to pressure Lukashenko, financed Belarussian civil society campaigns,
and launching a media campaign that depicted Lukashenko as an oppressive dictator. Similar
‘democracy rhetoric’ tactics, closely resembling West’s democratization discourse and agenda,
are said to have been used by Russia against Kyrgyz former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
From these instances, it is logical to infer that in its relations with the neighboring states,
Russia is much more concerned about control and access to resources, than about ideology as
such.
Yet, it suffices to ponder whether Russia actively exports certain ideas and norms,
particularly in its regional neighborhood? The political elites of Central Asian nations, while
having rejected Western ideas of liberal democracy and human rights and remain skeptical of
the aims of Western democratization efforts, have actively adopted Kremlin’s ideas about
“legitimacy, authority, respect, order, and sovereignty…because they already existed locally
and enhanced the authority and legitimacy of the governing elite” (Jackson 2010:104)
Recently Russia’s Foreign Ministry has released a thorough report, overviewing human
rights situation in countries around the world. The report starts with the criticism of the US,
stating that human rights abuses by the US government, including violations of the law of war
and disproportionate use of force, are “far from the ideals declared by Washington…the main
unresolved problem is the odious prison in Guantanamo Bay, secret US prisons in Europe,
unauthorized surveillance of American citizens and racial and religious discrimination”.
The report also targets in particular countries of the Baltic region, which are said to
grossly violate the rights of ethnic Russian minorities, as well as Georgia for violating minority
rights, and forced resettlements as well as putting down peaceful protests. The report
concludes with the focus on the violation of international law in the course of NATO operation
in Lybia with the blame being placed on NATO and the Lybian rebels60. It’s a first time that
such a report is issued by the Russian authorities and clearly shows that Russia criticizes the
democratic credentials of other countries for the most part so as to divert external criticism
away from itself, as noted by Ambrosio (2009).
Bader et.al. (2010: 85) ponder specifically a theoretical argumentation of the problem
of autocracy promotion by authoritarian regional powers and argue generally that
governments overall are not indifferent with respect to the political regime type of other
states, especially those in their immediate neighborhood and tend to “develop a preference
towards systems convergence, in particular in their regional environment”, in cases of
Doklad MID Rossii “O situazii s pravami cheloveka v riade gosudarstv mira”, 28 December, 2011,
http://www.mid.ru
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politically unstable countries. Yet at the same time it is argued that by the logic of a rationalchoice model, according to which foreign policy preferences are the direct result of a
government’s interest in domestic political survival, “authoritarian and democratic powers
alike tend to be driven by an overarching preference for ‘stability” in foreign relations”, i.e.
regional powers favor the continuation of the status quo, with a stable domestic environment
prevailing in the other states, without a consideration of the form of government existing in
that state.
In relation to the case study on Russia, the scholars argue that Russia’s authoritarian
turn has caused it to prefer similar forms of regime in the other former Soviet states. In
particular the cases of Georgia and Kyrgystan exemplify how pressure for system
convergence was applied on the part of Russia, as both countries were relatively weak states,
which made the costs of regime change strategy relatively low.
Russia and other authoritarian states
On several occasions former foreign minister Primakov entertained an idea of creating
a counter-hegemonic alliance of countries such as Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, China, those
distrustful and hostile to the United States and upholding the notion of absolute sovereignty
and noninterference in domestic affairs (Mankoff 2009: 30). As emphasized throughout the
present study, Russia is one of the major forces behind ‘authoritarian backlash’ against
international democracy promotion on the domestic level and on the international scale as well.
Ambrosio’s (2009) analysis presented in Chapter 3 reveals that Russia, being an authoritarian
regime, is actively confronting democratization at the international level. Furthermore, Russia
serves as a potential model and an ally for those authoritarian countries that are resisting
democratic pressures from the West.
Silitski’s (2006) analysis in similar vein emphasizes what he sees as the ‘rise of the
authoritarian internationale’ specifically in the post-Soviet Eurasian region, a trend that
follows the efforts on the part of authoritarian regimes to take preemptive actions in order to
combat the democratic contagion resulting in the so-called preemptive authoritarianism,
defined by Silitski as “a strategy to combat the democratic contagion that is pursued in
anticipation of a political challenge, even when there is no immediate danger of a regime
change”. It is precisely this preemptive strategy that externally leads to cooperation between
non-democratic regimes. At the international level, the leading authoritarian regimes are
targeting regional and international organization, such as UN, OSCE, OAS, in order to hinder
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their human rights and democracy promotion agendas (Freedom House 2009).
Scholars on the ‘autocratic peace’, presented in Chapter 3, argue that there may be a
separate peace among authoritarian regimes, even if not as robust as the one found among
democracies. For there prevails a common interest among such regimes to cooperate more
closely among themselves in preserving their rule. Russia’s foreign policy has been directed at
times deliberately towards strengthening ties with non-democracies. Dealing with
authoritarian regimes may be relatively straightforward and unproblematic. China’s
traditional preoccupation with “foreign devils” makes it a natural partner for Russia as both
have strived for a multipolar world, argues Kalb (2012). The current situation in Syria stands
as a contending issue and as an example of Russia’s most recent retreat from cooperation
with the West and as some observers claim (see for example Kaufmann 2012) a stark instance
of autocratic regimes propping up another authoritarian regime, namely Russia and China
supporting Syria.
Scholars like Burnell (2006) point to the inadvertent and involuntary role that China
plays, while seeking to pursuit solely economic interests, in fostering what he terms ‘antidemocracy promotion’. Thus, Burnell’s argument suggests that authoritarian regimes such as
China, are not actively campaigning against democracy abroad. This argument is reinforced by
Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Small’ (2008) observation of a significant change in the last few years in
China’s diplomacy towards pariah regimes. China continues to proclaim and uphold a general
policy of nonintervention, which suggests that there is a limit to how far China may be
involved globally, beyond financial and economic spheres61.
In the similar fashion, Carothers (2009) argues that China’s foreign policy is “more
mercantilist then pro-authoritarian.” Furthermore, Mankoff (2009:301) claims that “in some
ways, China’s view of the international order has more in common with that of the Western
powers than with that of Russia…Despite its authoritarian tendencies, China has more to gain
from partnering with the West in a globalized world than from seeking to overturn a global
order that has made it one of the fastest-growing, most dynamic countries in the world in just
over a generation.” Mankoff’s argument is quite cogent and reveals the state of current global
economic and financial interdependence in which financial-market movements can overwhelm
China’s 2011 move to buy up euro zone debt by bolstering Europe’s Financial Stability Facility may well be a
sign of the West’s growing need for China’s international engagement. China’s Central Bank is expected to make a
100 billion euro contribution but Beijing has also made it clear that its help will not come without conditions.
Source: “China pledges to keep buying eurozone debt”, The Telegraph, 15 February 2012,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9083297/China-pledges-to-keep-buying-eurozonedebt.html
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most countries, especially the largest economies such as the US and China. So that should
China’s Central Bank for some reason reject US Treasury bonds, this would in turn cause
interest rates to rise leading to the recession in the US economy. In turn, the Chinese economy
would be in serious economic trouble should the US choose not to import Chinese products.
In this context it suffices to reiterate that Russia, like many other countries, depends
significantly on the world economy and has increasingly become more interconnected (as
stressed in the previous chapter) particularly so following its much-awaited accession to the
WTO in late 2011. This in turn imposes limits on its ability to carry out a foreign policy course
that would be run counter to its proclaimed goal of becoming a strong global power with viable
and self- sufficient economic and financial system.
Conclusion
Throughout the analysis presented on Russia in both Chapter 4 and 5 of this study, the
idea was to examine the nature of the authoritarian rule in Russia and its linkage to Kremlin’s
foreign policy behavior. A change in a regime type in the Russian political setting has given
birth to a particular foreign policy course, motivated largely as it was by domestic
considerations. The study has sought to explore how domestic regime type influences foreign
policy behavior of Russia.
The idea was to examine the way in which authoritarian political rule shapes Russia’s
foreign policy, its relation with the West and its policy in its ‘near abroad’. Russia is
authoritarian regime, bordering to its south by equally authoritarian regimes. Observers tend
to point to a direct connection between the Putin regime’s domestic agenda of building a
supreme state and what appears as at times an expansionist and neo-imperialist external
behavior of Kremlin.
As we have seen, Yeltsin’s Russia was dependent on the Western aid and support and
thus the foreign policy course was more contingent on Russia’s domestic development
priorities. The idea was to make Russia a member of the community of developed democratic
states of the West, taking on an active role in addressing acute global economic, political,
social, environmental and nuclear security issues. Under Putin, foreign policy became more
independent and pronounced. In turn, many in the West have interpreted Russia’s new
assertiveness as a challenge to the West and a sign of its hegemonic ambitions. Russia stands
in staunch defense of its ‘privileged’ position in its Near Abroad and seeks other powers
recognize its primacy in the former Soviet Union region.
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Foreign policy under Putin was coherent and independent. The rise of autocracy in
Russia has lead to ‘monopoly’ by central state over foreign policy decision-making, largely
displacing various actors from decision-making process, such as parties, private sector and
technical experts, thereby “embedding” key institutions with like-minded ideologues (to use
Corrales (2009) terminology with regards to case study on Venezuela’s foreign policy)
A number of scholars (see for example Mankoff 2009, Tsygankov 2010) note that ideas
and preferences driving Russian foreign policy have broadly remained unaltered and there is
a visible trend of continuity in Russian foreign policy behavior from at least the mid-1990s
well into Medvedev’s presidency. Indeed, the Russian ruling elites continue to proclaim Russia
as a great power with national interests in a traditional sense of the word, as surviving in the
international system of states, the relationship among which is in part defined according to
traditional measures of power.
The world outside is portrayed as being hostile, and the country is always faced with
new challenges and threats to its security, requiring a strong state with a strong military. In
the recent years the Kremlin has taken steps to boost Russia’s military strength, the budget
allocations are enormous. Building up militarily is regarded as essential to keeping the status
of a great power with influence in world affairs.
Such great power rhetoric and the identification of ‘new enemies’ has dominated
Putin’s pre-march 2012 presidential election campaign as a candidate. According to Putin:
“the world is facing a growing ‘cult of violence’ in international affairs and warned the West
against interference in Russia by stressing that Moscow must not let events like those in Libya
and Syria be repeated in Russia.62 Thus, quite bluntly, Putin is planting anti-US sentiments
across the population. Moreover, in his presidential campaign program 2012-2018 “Strong
Russia in a complex world”, Putin lays main emphases on Russia’ integration projects in the
post-Soviet Union region, especially the creation of the Eurasian Union, as analogous to the
European Union.
The intellectual disposition to portray Russia as a great power is an ever-present
ambition among the ruling elite. Although as we have learned the country is faced with a
wealth of remaining domestic challenges and constraints that greatly impedes its ability to
boost significantly its standing on the world stage. “Russia’s internal health determines its
destiny among the nations of the earth” (Chambers 2010:125).
Inga Umasheva, VestiFM, “Vladimir Putin obespokoen mirovim kultom nasilia”, February 8, 2012,
http://www.radiovesti.ru/articles/2012-02-08/fm/32778
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This would ultimately require dismantling a highly entrenched system of corruption,
patronage and cronyism that permeates throughout the ruling government and the whole
socio-economic system of governance. Resolving this gross problem requires public oversight,
which remains quite weak, and this can be done only with greater freedom afforded to mass
media, a greater independent role for the Parliament and a more involved role for civil bodies.
The inability of the ruling elite to address these fundamental flaws and shortcomings of the
existing system, will further ignite public frustration and stand to potential incite further mass
protests that have taken place in recent months (discussed in the previous Chapter). At the
same time, endemic corruption is widely known to prevent foreign investment and Russia has
already seen a net capital outflow of $84 billion in 2011.63
Russia is an enormous country and the Kremlin must maintain and sustain an
extensive welfare system, a vast bureaucracy, a modernizing military, while addressing the
alarming trends of impending epidemics of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, low life expectancy
and high infant mortality. Indeed, Russia’s great power status will be primarily determined by
its ability to address acute domestic challenges and the ability to maintain strong economic
capacity. However, one expects a measurably bolder stance of the Russian leadership in various
dimensions of its foreign policy course to persist well into the future with however limited
resources at its disposal.
63
Jason Bush, “Putin’s state sector crackdown: more show than substance”, Reuters, 16 February 2012
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Conclusion
The study has sought to weave out internal and external forces affecting political
governance in autocracies. One of the central points woven throughout the analysis was that
authoritarian regime stability in Russia is brought about by the prevalence and interplay of
domestic and external factors.
The present analysis has sought to synthesize and examine the growing theoretical and
empirical studies on autocratic rule, bringing together the fields of comparative politics and
international relations. The analysis has sought to contribute to the existing body of in-depth
comparative studies on authoritarian rule that habituates fairly successfully in the
democratization era of today. Understanding the essence of authoritarian rule is crucial in
order to comprehend regime dynamics, causes, consequences and possibilities of change, if any,
towards democracy.
Authoritarian regimes are less studied in political science than democracies and the
aim of the present study was to bring together a growing field of literature dealing with
autocratic politics. This study has applied a descriptive and analytical approach in its research
methodology in order to form theoretical claims and apply them to the case study on Russia.
Assessing the more recent political regime dynamics in Russia in detail is necessitated in
order to shed more light on the widespread scholarly speculation about the role and influence
of leading authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes such as Russia on the international
politics.
A number of branches of literature were taken into account in addressing the issue of
authoritarian politics, namely scholarship on current democratization trends, appeal and
legitimacy of democracy as a regime type in general, prevailing findings in democratization
scholarship (Chapter 1) and scholarship on contemporary authoritarian regimes and role of
regime type in international politics (Chapter 2 and 3). At the beginning, the analysis has
assessed global democratization trends and laid out main theoretical and empirical
arguments on democracy’s global advancement. Within this context, it was shown that the
democratization process is not a smooth and teleological one. The diagnose of a ‘democratic
retreat’ and ‘authoritarian backlash’ by a number of prominent scholars in the field of
democratization studies appear to be sound given the overall state of the global political
landscape and some more recent trends regionally and at a country-level of analysis.
The study highlighted sources of resilience of authoritarian type of rule, stressing both
domestic and international variables. We have seen how under certain conditions
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authoritarian regimes can last – they are not merely diminished forms of democracy –
mutating into a new form of authoritarian rule that combines formal democratic institutions
with autocratic practices. The scholarship presented cogently underscores the failure of a
‘transition paradigm’ to account for divergence in political trajectories, for alternative political
outcomes that may not lead inevitably to liberal democracy. The ‘third wave’ of global
democratization has led to the creation of some types of democracy, yet at the same time gave
birth to new forms of authoritarianism that cannot be categorized the same way as classic
types of one-party, military, or personal dictatorship. Comparative politics scholars have been
developing new concepts and data to address one of the central issues in the field, namely
what shape and form authoritarian rule takes on.
The most distinctive features of contemporary authoritarians are that they adopt basic
institutional forms of democracy, allow some degree of political pluralism, yet systematically
violate basic democratic standards, primarily by manipulating electoral outcomes in order to
sustain their rule. Highlighting specific traits of non-democratic form of rule involves
categorizations and typologies. It also involves asking why and how such types of regimes
persist in the age of globalization.
On the domestic level, authoritarianism is primarily protracted by the ruling elite’s
capacity to maintaining elite cohesion by the means of policy concessions, distribution of
patronage and privileges, manipulation of political institutions such as legislature and parties
to maintain elite unity, and the effectiveness of state coercive capacity.
At the same time it was argued that international factors are quite significant in
sustaining and prolonging authoritarian rule as well, amongst the most decisive are the
undermined legitimacy of international democracy promotion campaign, level of linkage with
the West, and the ruling elite’s active campaign of barring external forces that strengthen and
sustain regime opposition.
While the basic level of analysis of authoritarian endurance remains largely domestic,
external factors are increasingly gaining prominence. It is argued that much more scholarly
attention should be directed to examination of international factors that are increasingly
playing a far greater role in prolonging authoritarian rule. At the same time the discussion on
the phenomenon of authoritarianism is taken to the international level of analysis and an
equally important question has been posed relating to authoritarian states’ international
behavior in relation to their internal dynamics. This has essentially been carried out through
the prism of the democratic peace paradigm, and it was argued that the paradigm has a high
potential to greatly contribute to our understanding of the democracy-autocracy dichotomy.
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As far as conflict propensity is concerned, the relevant scholarship on ‘autocratic peace’ has
generally revealed that authoritarian regimes behave different depending on their types.
Furthermore given that authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China are, arguably,
ascending at the international stage and their influence has considerably expanded, the
analysis has sought to highlight the prevailing discourse on what this means for the
discussion on the relationship between regime type and foreign policy behavior. In particular,
considerable attention has been paid to the notion of a plausible ‘authoritarian backlash’
against democracy promotion at the international level. The original works by
Diamond(2008), Ambrosio (2009) and Burnell (2010) have especially been highlighted for
their examination of the relationship between the international level, democratization and
authoritarianism.
The major theoretical and empirical findings on authoritarianism’s international
outreach, as underdeveloped and recent as they are, highlight essentially two significant
tendencies, namely that:
∗ authoritarian states’ international behavior is clearly influenced by the logic of
their domestic politics. As a result the ruling elite form a distinct foreign policy
vision that champions an idea of the world where nations do not interfere in one
another’s affairs, seeking to protect regime sovereignty and ensure that West’
democracy promotion endeavor is delegitimized, at the same time promoting
authoritarian state-led economic development.
∗ while the claims of an active autocratic resistance to the spread of democracy
globally remains contentious, support for autocratization abroad does take place,
with non-democratic forms of rule being contagious across borders, which in turn
raises some concerns about the implications for the spread of democracy and
democracy promotion campaign.
The case of Russia (Chapter 4 and 5) has supported generally the major theoretical
claims of the present analysis and has sought to unravel how and which internal and external
factors influence the political situation in the country and at the same time examine further
how Russia’s political system influences its foreign policy course. Chapter 4 has portrayed the
nature of a political regime in Russia and specific factors that since the early 1990s have
contributed to solidification of authoritarian trends. The centralized power vested in the Putin
regime holds together a quite cohesive state apparatus, a firm grip on the economy, while at the
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same time paying much attention to disguising authoritarian personalized rule as democracy to
the Russian public.
It was argued that leadership personality plays a quite significant role in the context of
any discourse on Russia’s current political system. Making all the more relevant the question
of who governs the country? At the same time, the very notion of a political ‘regime’ as a
system of governance, utilized throughout this study, highlights the importance of posing the
question of how a country is governed, which crucially involves a discussion that would
encompass a wider set of determinative factors apart from incumbent state leadership, to
include the domestic institutional setting, policies and rules.
The 2011-2012 election cycle in Russia has been an intense political season that has
attracted a great deal of media and scholarly attention; for the first time in the last twenty
years the country has seen the biggest public rallies with the Russian public suddenly
becoming politically active. The analysis has attributed this phenomenon to a ‘voter fatigue’
factor, i.e. realization on the part of the society that Putin will be in the office for a long period
of time.
Overall, by all measures the public support for the political regime has indeed
markedly fallen, but it should be recalled that previously it was quite high enabling a further
support of the system of government by a substantial percentage of Russians at least in the
medium term future. The societal dissatisfaction has notably grown since the late 2010, but
opposition strength is quite weak and unable to foster a coherent and influential force to face
the ruling regime.
There is no doubt that Russia today is an authoritarian country. The prevailing Russian
regime is proving resilient and will most likely endure well into the future precisely because the
kind of authoritarianism that exists there has incongruous elements that are at odds with each
other: on the one hand, the regime appears to be stable and in control, while on the other hand,
keeping its borders open, allowing its people free travel and use freely the Internet. The 2012
March presidential elections in Russia has led to Putin’s securing six years in power, with
Russian political regime on the way to cementing its authoritarian traits and one should
expect further curtailing of foreign influence on domestic politics.
This study has argued that Putin remains one of the most important political figures, who
makes decisions within a limited circle of a ruling group that includes former President
Medvedev and other players from the security, law enforcement and business community. As
Paul H. Lewis (1978) argues however: “Regardless of how powerful dictators are, the
complexities of modern society and government make it impossible for them to rule alone.
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They may dominate their respective systems, but some of their authority must be delegated,
which means that a government elite stratum is formed just below them.” The theoretical
findings, largely presented in Chapter 2, reveal that the survival of most authoritarian leaders
depends predominately on an ability to maintain cohesion among the elites. In this regard,
Putin must ensure the satisfaction of elites and deter elite defections.
Wegren and Herspring (2010: 293) speak of a distinctive mind-set of Russian ruling
elite, one that defines an approach towards those who are governed. The four major defining
traits of such a mind-set are said to be “mutually reinforcing explain the incomplete
democratization in Russia” and include “a feeling of insecurity among the top political elite; a
distrust of genuine democracy by that elite; a fear of a ‘color revolution’ in Russia; and the
threat of domestic instability, whether from domestic terrorism or domestic political
opposition.”
Is political change possible in Russia? Even though power shifts are less likely, political
system is in a state of evolution. It is impossible as of yet to foresee whether a change towards
a more liberal regime is possible for Russia in the foreseeable perspective. The ruling regime
in Russia will continue the course of pursuing a calibrated economic opening without
meaningful political reform. One of the main pillars of legitimacy of the ruling elite is
economic wellbeing of the nation. Thus, economic conditions stand to influence the political
choices available to its leaders and the types of decisions they will make. Vast oil and gas
reserves will continue to prop up an authoritarian regime there.
The authoritarian politics bodes ill for the growth of Russian economy, compromising
Russia’s global future economic standing. According to the Nobel economics laureate Paul
Krugman, Russia does not belong among the so-called BRIC nations, ‘it’s a petro-economy in
terms of world trade…its role in the world right now is not at all similar to China’.64 Indeed,
meeting future foreign policy challenges will not prove effective should the Russian authorities
choose not to reform the domestic political system.
Particularly during period of economic crisis that characterize the global outlook
today, it is immensely difficult to stimulate and sustain the support of a critical subset of the
mass population of Russia by providing necessary financial incentives. By some estimates,
prior to the March 4th presidential elections, Putin election campaign promises to the masses,
amidst the mass street demonstrations, could cost up to $161 billion of government spending
Alena Chechel, “Russia Sees Stalling Economy, Ruble Plunge at $60 Oil Price”, Bloomberg, 13 September 2011,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-13/russia-sees-stalling-economy-ruble-plunge-at-60-oilprice.html
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through to 2018. Many observers doubt the sustainability of rising public expenditures in the
state’s finances and point to the risks involved for the macroeconomic stability in the future.65
Country’s lingering problems such as population health, demographic dynamics, point to its
internal weakness that stands to impede significantly on the ruling elite’s aspiration to remain
one of the major global powers.
At the same time the study has sought to outline international factors that protract
authoritarianism in Russia’s domestic political setting. The prevailing international context
stands as a significant factor in determining why Russia’s political system has become sternly
authoritarian. It was argued that the international environment that has emerged after the
end of the Cold War has substantially contributed to autocratization of Russia and a number
of the more recent global events stand to further solidify Kremlin’s authoritarian rule.
Especially noteworthy are the events following the 2003-2005 wave of the so-called ‘color
revolutions’ in three of the former Soviet Union states, particularly that which has taken place
in Ukraine, by the end of which Western democracy aid programs were no longer welcomed
in the country as the Russian ruling elites have undertaken swift measures to insulate as
much as possible their regime from the outside influence.
The ‘Arab Spring’ events have resonated in Russia quiet strongly as well. The events
that have unraveled in the Middle East stand to be of historical significance and the profound
transformations that are taking place in the Arab world will take years to show any significant
dynamic. Plattner (2011) claims that the revolts that have been extensive throughout the
Middle East during 2011 ‘have already had a dramatic impact on global perceptions of the
fortunes of democracy’. However, as the situation has progressed in both Tunisia and Egypt,
the transitions have proven to be quite difficult and already encountered serious setbacks for
democracy. Western scholars were quick to stress that the events in the Middle East trigged a
state of fear and loss of self-confidence among authoritarians around the world. Yet at the
same time, the events have clearly prompted authoritarian regimes to stand on guard and
seek ways to adapt.
While the result of the recent presidential elections as no surprise to many, the future
of political regime in Russia designed as it was according to a model of state governance defined
by the Putin regime remains an open question. Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 has
clear repercussions for the way the political system in Russia will be maintained. Russian
Howard Amos, “Putin’s Election Promises Could Cost $161Bln”, 28 February 2012, the Moscow Times,
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/putin-election-promises-could-cost-161bln/453759.html
[accessed 29 February 2012]
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politics have never been so easily foreseeable and hardly follow conventional wisdom. While
this analysis is being carried out, the political situation in Russia continues to evolve following
the 2011-2012 election cycle.
The literature is plentiful on Russia’s internal transformation, far less attention,
however, has been paid to the impact of this transformation on the Russian foreign policy. We
have seen in Chapter 5 that foreign policy preferences of Russia are strongly influenced by its
domestic politics. It was essentially argued that Russia’s foreign policy was and remains
‘domestic’ in a sense that it is substantially subordinated to the goals of domestic agenda of
consolidating the state and undertaking economic reforms. At the same time, it is argued that
while seeking to secure its national and commercial interests abroad, in its relations with
other countries, Russia has sought to promote, at times intentionally, an idea of a strong
centralized state, impervious to outside interference in its domestic affairs. The Russian ruling
elite advocate a world order, in which there exist alternative political models of development
that differ from Western liberal democracy model. Quite significantly, Russia stands in
staunch defense of its ‘privileged’ position in its Near Abroad and seeks other powers
recognize its primacy in the former Soviet Union region.
The intellectual disposition to portray Russia as a great power is an ever-present
ambition among the ruling elite. Although as we have learned that the country is faced with a
wealth of remaining domestic challenges and constraints that greatly impede its ability to
boost significantly its standing on the world stage.
Venues for future research
While the basic level of analysis of authoritarian endurance remains largely domestic,
external factors are increasingly gaining prominence. It is argued that much more scholarly
attention should be directed to examination of international factors are increasingly playing a
far greater role in prolonging authoritarian rule. The idea to ponder is that the very forces
that are meant to foster globalization, capitalism and increasing international and
transnational interdependence and pressures, are equally contributing to the sustaining of
authoritarian rule.
There are multiple avenues available for future research on authoritarian regimes. In
particular, scholarship in this area would benefit greatly from further in-depth analysis of
relationship between types of authoritarian regimes and levels of development and growth.
Any future research that links international causes to regime transition could benefit by
124
undertaking a systematic and comparative approach of cases studies to weave out concrete
factors that elicit and strengthen authoritarianism.
The research that deals with the issue of relationship between authoritarianism and
corruption is in its nascent stage and there is little in-depth empirical research done in this
field. Golden and Chang (2006) analysis on this topic lays emphasis on the idea that
corruption prevails more often in personalist type of authoritarian rule as opposed to oneparty or military type. This is accounted for by the fact that in personalist dictatorships there
is the lack of institutionalized provisions for succession, largely present in other types of
authoritarian regimes, which means that the political future of personalist authoritarians is
not established, prompting them to seek a short term gain in order to increase one’s own
personal wealth as well as distribute perks to supporters under few checks on their behavior.
Overall however, corruption in personalist dictatorships is still an underdeveloped study that
warrants further investigation.
There is a continuing propensity among democratization scholars to argue for an
inevitable liberalization of those institutions that authoritarian regimes borrow from
democratic countries and that processes of globalization and interconnectedness it fosters
take on a homogenizing tendencies. However, such reasoning is contested by an emerging
strand of research on external dimension of authoritarianization of political regimes. Namely,
Burnell and Schlumberger (2012) analysis is a primary attempt to set future research agendas
for an analytical approach to addressing the question of political regime development and the
important international dimensions to this topic.
125
Interviews conducted by the author:
(name, title, organization, date of interview, place of interview)
Dr. Carmen Claudin, Program Director, Centro de Estudios y Documentacion Internacionales
de Barcelona (Barcelona Spain), October 2009 in Barcelona, Spain
Michael Emerson, Associate senior research fellow, Center for European Policy Studies
(Brussels, Belgium), September - December 2010 in Brussels, Belgium
Professor Daniele Archibugi, Italian National Research Council and University of London,
Birkbeck College, October 2010 in Rome, Italy
Felix Krawatzek, visiting researcher at Center for European Policy Studies and MPhil
candidate at Oxford University, September 2010, in Brussels, Belgium
Professor Thomas Ambrosio, associate professor of political science at North Dakota state
University, email exchanges, February 2011
Professor Dmitri Vasil’ev, Institute of Business and Politics (Moscow Russia), April 2011 in
Moscow, Russia
Professor Victor Zavialov, Moscow University of Finance, April 2011 in Moscow, Russia
Professor Leonardo Morlino, LUISS Professor of Political Science, January 2012 in Rome,
Italy
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